The Truth About Lies

by Tracy Darnton

  “Harrison went on about health and safety too much,” says Keira. “He’s obsessed. Staying in pairs, taking on water, first aid, keep out of the bogs. Some people looked terrified by the time he’d finished. I’m glad I’m only being a marshal.”

  “And that bizarre bit at the end when he went all teary: ‘I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to any of you on my watch’,” says Maya, imitating Harrison.

  That’s what guilt does to you.

  “It doesn’t look good if someone you’re counselling dies, like Hanna did,” says Keira.

  “And Barker can’t afford to lose any other staff, after Desai’s disappearance,” adds Dan.

  “That’s all so not our problem,” says Maya, clapping her hands together. “We need to change the vibe for this event after his downer and luckily I bring good news: the T-shirts have finally arrived. They’re so cool. I was going to save them for tomorrow but we all need cheering up.” She drags a cardboard box out from under the table-tennis table. “Choose a baggy size and then you can wear it over your other layers otherwise you won’t have it on show.”

  “Wow. They’re bright! Do we need to wear sunglasses?” says Dan.

  “They are more neon than I’d expected,” says Maya. “But at least we won’t lose each other if it’s foggy.”

  “I’ll take one to Harrison,” I say, grabbing an extra large. After what I saw in his office, I want to talk to him on my own. “Won’t be long. I’ll see you all later if you’re still here, or in the morning, ready for action.”

  Dan looks up, puzzled, but I dash off before he can say anything, leaving him to Keira, who’s enjoying trying different shirt sizes against his torso.

  *

  I knock gently on the door to Mandela Lodge but don’t wait for an answer. Harrison’s sitting at his desk, his head in his hands. He barely looks up. “Jess. What can I do for you?”

  I pull up a chair.

  He adjusts his glasses and rubs his hands through his thinning hair. “Now isn’t such a good time. Maybe tomorrow. We’ll all feel better after the hike’s over.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to feel any better,” I say.

  “Me? I meant you.”

  “You’re the one who looks like death warmed up.”

  “Thanks.” He smiles for the first time.

  “I brought you a gift,” I say, handing over the T-shirt. “We can all look ridiculous together tomorrow.”

  “Walking together to remember,” he reads.

  Too much remembering is eating both of us up.

  “Tonight is a new kind of counselling session,” I say. “Two-way. You know my secrets and I know yours.”

  He shifts on his chair. “I don’t know what on earth you mean. If you’re talking about the other night when I’d had a little too much to drink…”

  More than a little, but I let it pass.

  I swallow and then I say it: “I’m not talking about that. I mean Hanna.”

  I’ve got his attention. He looks me straight in the eyes.

  I carry on: “And the drugs you were ‘prescribing’, illegally.”

  He starts to deny it, but really what’s the point? He knows I saw her medication. I realize I told him in our memory box conversation. He was worried enough to go to my room to retrieve them. He slumps defeated in the chair before sighing and finally saying: “I was trying to help her. Really. She was insecure in many ways.”

  “Even though she was beautiful.”

  “She couldn’t see that herself, sadly. But when all’s said and done, she was just a kid.” Harrison sighs and pours us each a glass of water. “I’ve given up the hard stuff, again. I’m trying to be a better person, to others, to my wife, if she’ll let me.”

  “So you were giving Hanna medicine you got online,” I say. “I read her file.”

  He raises an eyebrow.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve left it where I found it,” I say. “And I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  “It seems stupid now,” he says. “But at the time … I wanted to help her anxieties. I thought I was, I don’t know…”

  “Able to fix her? The only one able to fix her.”

  “Which shows what a terrible grasp I had of my role as her counsellor,” he says, shaking his head. “I was keeping her to myself, not referring her to a proper clinical psychologist or psychiatrist. God complex, narcissistic personality disorder, counter-transference – you name it, I had it. Textbook breaches. And I’ve violated every code of the British Psychotherapy and Counselling Council to boot.”

  “So our little episode with hypnotherapy…” I say.

  “…is merely the icing on the cake of my unethical adventures.”

  “Well, here’s to that,” I say, raising my glass. “Don’t worry, I was never taken in by your certificates from dodgy institutions. I’m assuming your ‘doctor’ one wouldn’t get you a job anywhere that they check these things out properly.”

  We both sip our water. Harrison swirls his glass like it’s a gin and tonic, as though there’s an answer hidden in the bottom of it.

  “The guilt,” says Harrison. “I can’t shake it off. I gave her medication which I had no authority to prescribe. I’ve been living in fear that someone will come and say they found traces in the tests they did on her.”

  “That’s why I scared the living daylights out of you the other day talking about drug testing?” I ask.

  “Yes. So I added burglary to my list of misdemeanours.”

  “You weren’t very good at it,” I say.

  “I’ve come to realize I’m not very good at anything. Except messing up.” He takes a gulp of water again. He looks older. A grey and lined middle-aged loser.

  “So the combination of these drugs you gave her…?” I ask.

  “They had a bad mix of side effects which I should have monitored.”

  “And she was mixing them with alcohol,” I say. “She’d had a boozy summer with Ed and she carried on when term started. She mixed cocktails in our room. She called them cocktails but they were mostly vodka, with a paper umbrella. And she lived on caffeine drinks.” I encouraged her.

  “I should have realized. I should have been keeping a better eye on her. Confusion and weight loss…”

  “Plus blurred vision, tachycardia, nausea,” I say. “But you can’t know for sure what happened that day she fell from the window, can you?”

  “No, but this feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me I’m responsible. I’m quitting for good,” he says. “Not fit to practise anything. I’m resigning straight after Hanna’s Hike. No doubt the Principal will want to hush it up. But I wanted to do one last thing for Hanna before I go. I thought I’d feel better.”

  “Maybe you should get some counselling?” I say. “It’s tragic when young life full of promise is ripped away but time can heal.” I repeat the fortune-cookie psychology from his sessions back to him.

  “Physician, heal thyself!”

  “I’m not going to tell anyone,” I say. “I meant what I said.”

  “Thank you. My wife’s putting it all down to a midlife crisis. I haven’t persuaded her to let me move back in yet. Another area of my life I seem to have messed up.”

  We sit in silence for a moment. I don’t want to embark on marriage counselling.

  “I’m missing the biscuits,” I say. “I miss the custard creams and the chocolate digestives.”

  “I thought you hated everything about our sessions,” he says. “You’re one of my more challenging clients.”

  “There’s a lot going on in my head,” I say.

  “And you were always holding back. Confession is good for the soul. If there’s anything you need to tell me?”

  Should I tell him and then both our souls are cleansed?

  I take a breath. “Sometimes I liked Hanna, sometimes I hated her.”

  “That’s the first honest statement you’ve made to me about your relationship with Hanna,” he says. “But that can be frie
ndship at your age: love/hate. She played games with people’s feelings. Keira, for instance. She’s reacted most strangely to Hanna’s death, harboured a most unhealthy fixation. Writing sympathy cards, hanging round the shrine.”

  So Keira’s definitely the one messing with the shrine and the Ouija board. Sick.

  “I know Hanna taunted you about Ed. I wondered if you were jealous because of your feelings for him…” He pauses and leans forwards. “Or because of your feelings for Hanna?”

  “Very Sigmund Freud of you,” I say.

  “It’s an interesting theory, though.”

  “I guess that’s the kind of puzzle you’re meant to untangle,” I say, dodging his question.

  “Yes. If I was any good at my job.”

  I let him have a brief wallow in self-pity without correcting him. I suppose he’s the nearest thing I have to a confessor, a confidant, who cannot judge me. “What if I acted on those feelings?” I say slowly. “What if I made her worse?”

  Harrison looks surprised for the first time. “What? Legal highs? Ecstasy? I worried she was taking something else.”

  “She may well have been, but no, not from me,” I say. “But I encouraged her to think about her looks all the time. I didn’t stop her from messing about with laxatives, appetite suppressants, bogus diet remedies. I was pleased she wasn’t the one in control for once.”

  I’ve said it now. I wait for his reaction. He says nothing.

  “At the time, with Ed and everything,” I say. “I wanted to get back at her. I couldn’t let it go.”

  “But then combined with the anxiety medication I gave her…” he says.

  “And the alcohol.”

  “She was confused and fell?” he asks.

  Had the things I’d said, whispered in her ear like poison, made her feel so bad that she’d wanted to jump? I think of her on that last day. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring at her face in a small mirror, pulling at the flesh across her cheekbones. Dark, dark shadows under her eyes. I was angry that she was doing this to herself. I said she looked terrible, had let herself go. “Ed will be better off without you,” I said. “We’d all be better off without you.” And then I slammed our door shut behind me and didn’t ever see her again. Alive, that is.

  I say quietly: “Or maybe she actually wanted to kill herself?”

  “I don’t believe that. She’d never said so. But given we’ve established I’m a terrible counsellor, I’m not the best judge.”

  “I think you’re doing OK with me tonight,” I say.

  There’s a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

  “So there we are,” I say. “Did you cause what happened to Hanna, or did I, or the vodka cocktails or Hanna’s anxiety? Or was it breaking up with Ed that was a tipping point? Or was it all just a terrible accident?”

  Dr Harrison stands up and walks to the window. “It’s impossible to say. We’ll never know the truth of it. It seems we all have our own versions of the past. Our own remembered history.”

  I stand next to him and we both look out at the courtyard. There’s a twinkling of candles from the shrine, as if Hanna wants to join the conversation.

  “These last few weeks have been hell,” he says, wiping his eyes. “At times I thought she was haunting me.”

  “A series of unintended consequences with everyone and no one to blame. An open verdict,” I say. I want to believe that it wasn’t me. That it wasn’t what I said. That I can change for the future. “I miss her,” I whisper. “I actually miss her.” I do. I really do. As I start to cry real tears I feel a release of some kind. That recurring memory of Hanna smashed on the concrete is being filed on a shelf in my mind-library. Harrison’s tissue box is empty but he gives me a creased handkerchief. He holds me while I shake and weep. And afterwards I realize that talking with Harrison has finally made me feel better.

  37

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

  candle

  soft toys

  guilt

  love

  flowers

  Lego

  shame

  betrayal

  Work Your Memory

  It’s cold in the courtyard. My breath hangs in the air and my nose tingles. But I’m feeling better about Hanna.

  I pick up her weathered photo by the shrine and touch her cheek through the glass. Barker had a major tidy up after the Halloween excesses, but I wring out the last two teddy bears and add them to the rubbish with the burnt-down candles and the bedraggled flowers. I gather up the remaining candle holders and cards. I check the writing. Harrison was right: I reckon most of them are written by Keira. If she had her way, this would be here forever. No doubt it was Keira who set up the shrine on Halloween to spook me, who moved the planchette around the Ouija board. Her macabre fun and games are over.

  In the chapel, I pick up the Book of Condolence, sitting lonely on a side table, unopened for days, and add it to the rest of the artefacts in a spare cardboard box. Finally, I dismantle the Hanna Carlsen collaborative peace model. It’s a multicoloured abstract with Lego figures incongruously smiling out from random windows. The figure with a moustache looks strangely sinister.

  I write on the top of the box: ‘To be sent to the Carlsen Family’. I’m sure Hanna’s family have had their fill of all this too. Mawkish sentiment from people like Keira who didn’t love Hanna like they did. Like I did. One more day tomorrow and then I can put this to rest. I can say goodbye.

  I don’t really expect anyone to still be there, but when I return to the Common Room, Dan’s watching TV, flipping beer mats on the edge of the table.

  “Hey, you,” I say. “Shove up.” I lean my head against his shoulder, breathing in the smell of him.

  “Glad you came back for me,” he says. “I wasn’t sure you would. Where’ve you been?”

  “Tidying up,” I say. “Tidying up and sorting out.”

  “You look knackered,” he says. “You need a fifteen-mile hike tomorrow in bad weather to perk you up.”

  “Can’t wait. Team Dan and Jess. Yay!”

  “I thought we were Team Jess and Dan. That was the rule you set. Along with no mushy stuff.” He smiles at me. “When’s the next meeting of the Memory Club?”

  “We’ve got enough to be going on with,” I say. “I need to think about what to do with it all. How to get Coleman back. Maybe prepare material to send to the press, her university, scientific journals.”

  I don’t tell Dan – he wouldn’t understand – but my revenge on Coleman is going to be a lot more dramatic than sending a letter to a newspaper. She’s responsible for my mum’s death, however she chooses to dress it up. And if she wants me back on the Programme, back to being the girl with the amazing memory, the only way to stop that other than running forever is to get the proof of what she’s really about and expose her. Or do I have to stop her in another, more permanent way? After Callum and what happened to Lena, I need to be prepared. I can’t rely on Ramesh Desai to come and save me. I’m doing the hike for Hanna and then what? Will I have to leave everything here? Everyone?

  Dan switches off the TV. “Come on, I’ll walk you home. Coleman should be worried. You can be quite terrifying, you know. Every now and then a little ruthless look appears in your eyes, in a very attractive way.” He puts his arm round me as we go back to C-Block, tiptoeing past the houseparents’ apartment.

  In my room, we loiter by the door, kissing. Neither of us wants to be the one to say the last goodnight.

  “When this thing with Coleman’s over, what’s next?” he asks. “Maybe we could travel next summer. Together. If you wanted to. It’s OK if not, I mean…”

  This is when I feel most for him: when I can see the tiny freckles on his nose crinkle with uncertainty, when he’s so damn sweet but hot and wanting to be with me. The girl he knows as Jess with all her weirdness.

  But will it ever ‘be over’ with Col
eman unless I put an end to it? Dan is naïve about how things are going to pan out. And yet … there are things I want to do. I want to get fully detoxed from whatever stuff they were pumping into me, be able to sleep easily again. Live an alternate reality. Is there any harm in indulging the fantasy that I can be ‘normal’? Just for tonight?

  “I’d love to travel with you,” I say. “After exams, let’s do it.”

  “We should make a list,” says Dan. “A bucket list. Put places on it we want to visit.”

  “New York,” I say quietly. “I want to take Mum to New York.”

  “That’s settled, then. First on our list. We’ll go.” He takes both my hands in his. “I know you’ve had it really rough – with your mum and then Hanna. But things are going to get better. I’m going to make them better. You can come to stay with us at Christmas – it’s hectic obviously with Dad doing services and we have waifs and strays at the vicarage as well as the uncles and aunts and cousins and Granny Mel.”

  He carries on while I listen in a pleasant haze of imagining whether it can be that simple – can I plop into his ready-made perfect life? A new waif and stray at the vicarage to eat mince pies and sing carols around the tree.

  “The only thing is…”

  Here we go. The catch. There’s always a catch with the good stuff.

  “You’re going to need a Christmas jumper,” he says. “A truly tasteless one.”

  He laughs and envelops me in those huge arms of his and blows a raspberry on my neck and I catch myself feeling free and happy and not locked in my mind-library. Is it possible to forget after all?

  We tumble on to the bed, whacking my knee and his elbows on the clunky bed frame. These beds were not made for two.

  “Do you think they picked the bed that was least likely to lead to any form of rumpy-pumpy?” says Dan.

  “Rumpy-pumpy! What are you – a retired colonel from the 1930s?”

  “That is exactly what I am,” he says. “I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

  We dissolve into giggles which turn into snorts and I’m remembering times when I’ve felt like this before. It’s joy. Before Coleman took me on to the Programme and messed with my head.