The Lies We Tell

  ‘I thought he might have been,’ says Katy eventually, eager to say anything to bridge this gaping void. ‘It’s just something Andrew said once.’

  ‘That wasn’t for him to tell,’ Diane snaps, then softens her tone. ‘Yes. I suspected there were other women, of course, but didn’t know for sure for years. And when I did … well, by then it was too late.’

  ‘Too late?’ echoes Katy, unsure how best to redirect the spotlight onto the early years of their marriage. The time when her dad’s affairs began. The time, perhaps, when he might have met Siobhan.

  ‘Too late for us to save the marriage. I used to think the secret of a lasting relationship was compromise, at least that’s what your gran always told me. But there’s only so far you can go when only one person is doing all the taking and that person isn’t you.’

  Katy stares at her mum, her heart racing at the closing of the gulf separating her from the knowledge she so craves. Yet she can think of no subtle way to coax Diane to answer her questions without upsetting the fragile calm. She hesitates as she thinks once more of the faded Polaroid and the long years following that hot afternoon when she had almost come to believe what others told her had happened – that she had slipped and fallen – despite the fact she knew this to be untrue.

  No, the time has come to stop running. To stop running away from the truth. There really is no other way. Jude’s revelations, Diane’s attack and now the break in at the flat have left her reeling. But while Katy feels bloodied by something deep within, the long-lost knowledge she was instigator not victim, her mum’s acknowledgement that she jumped not fell persuades her she’s not yet beaten.

  ‘Do you remember Jude Davies?’ she asks abruptly.

  There is a pause before Diane replies. ‘I do,’ she says, her pale lips now pursed into a defensive Maginot line. ‘Your best friend for a while, wasn’t she?’

  For a moment, Katy is unsure whether her mum is being ironic. ‘Well,’ she continues, treading carefully. ‘I’d not heard from her in twenty years then, a week or two ago and quite out of the blue, she got back in touch. We met up. And she mentioned something about Dad.’ Is it her imagination or has the temperature in the room cooled? Glancing down, Katy sees her bare arms dimpled with goose bumps.

  ‘And what exactly did she mention?’ Diane asks coldly. ‘As if I need to ask. She always was a little stirrer. Like mother, like daughter, I always used to say. But then with a mother like that Jude never really stood a chance. Siobhan Davies was a tart. She flirted with everyone, especially the married men – positively relished the challenge. Although some married men were less resistant to her charms than others.’

  Though shocked by the bitterness in her mum’s voice, Katy presses on. ‘Dad, you mean.’ A statement of fact, not a question.

  Diane gives her daughter a hard stare.

  ‘Yes, your father,’ she eventually agrees. ‘It happened before you were born. She used to live in town then moved away. I didn’t know about it until many years later – until long after Jude started at St Mary’s. That was the final straw, I can tell you. When you and Jude became friends and then she started seeing Andrew I was convinced Siobhan had somehow put her up to it all to get her own back for the way your father treated her.’

  All thought of probing her mum further on the timing of what Katy is now convinced must have been her dad’s affair with Siobhan instantly evaporates. Andrew and Jude? How could she? And how could she, Katy, Jude’s best friend and Andrew’s sister, not have known? Jude and Andrew. Katy swallows and almost coughs as her tongue, dry and sticky, brushes the back of her throat.

  ‘Are you telling me Jude and Andrew went out?’ she says.

  ‘Why of course, though only for a few weeks. Until your dad persuaded him to break it off, which was something, I suppose. Goodness, Katy – don’t you remember it was you who told us, after all. And thank goodness you did, though you weren’t to know why. So tell me – what did Jude want?’

  But this is ridiculous, Katy thinks, willing herself to remember more clearly. I didn’t. Couldn’t have. Because I didn’t know. It was only …

  Then she feels the stirring of that old anger once again and, buried deep inside it, grasps the knowledge that what her mum is saying is true. The resentment she’d felt at how Jude was treating her. The hurt that came with how distracted she’d become. The risk that she might turn her attentions to someone else. The fear on seeing Jude and Andrew together in town one afternoon, sheepish and discreet. But surely they’d only bumped into each other by chance?

  The facts hadn’t mattered, not back then. For the coincidence of it was enough ammunition for Katy to concoct the lie then share it with her father to fuel his dislike of Jude. It had seemed the perfect way of getting back at both of them. Paying back Andrew for going away and Jude for … well, being Jude.

  ‘Katy?’ Diane repeats. ‘What did Jude want?’

  Though the swift shift of tack seems an obvious attempt to change the subject back to what her mum sees as safer, present ground, Katy grabs it. Perhaps Jude was lying. Or worse, maybe mum doesn’t know and, if that’s true, it’s time to stop: Katy has to be sure before delivering that heavy blow.

  ‘Why has she got back in touch?’ Diane repeated, more insistently this time. In fact, Katy realised with surprise, despite her battered face and bruised body she now seems angry. ‘What does she want? I can’t imagine Jude doing anything without some ulterior motive or other.’

  ‘She had a baby. A boy. A few months after moving away. He’s almost twenty now.’

  ‘Like mother like daughter – what did I tell you?’

  Ignoring her mum’s look of triumph, Katy presses on. ‘Mum, what did you really hear about why Jude and Siobhan moved away?’

  Diane’s attention latches onto a cotton thread dangling from the right-hand cuff of her top with which she starts to fiddle. The spirit has suddenly gone out of her. ‘Well I only know what that dumpy girl in your year, the one with the brace – Ruth something, she became a doctor – told me when she came to visit you in hospital. You were late coming back that afternoon. There was a fire on the heath. People were sent out to look for you. But before that woman in the car found you, Jude came back, alone, feeling ill –’

  Her mother frowns as, with a sharp tug, she snaps off the dangling cotton then carefully smoothes out the puckered fabric along the hem of her sleeve. Then she sniffs, disdainfully. ‘ – Siobhan picked her up and took her home,’ she continues. ‘Then they moved away. A few months later, someone I knew who used to work with Siobhan told me they’d moved back to Portsmouth where Jude had had a baby. Apparently, they left town just before she got big enough to show.’

  When would that have been, Katy wonders, thinking of Miriam from work. Four or five months, perhaps. Which would mean she got pregnant … some time in the spring. March, not June. A surge of relief courses through her.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  Diane sighs. ‘Tell you, but how could I? It took you months to get over the accident. You were so down for so long, not yourself at all. And we were all so relieved that they had gone. I didn’t want to upset you. Besides, I didn’t find out myself – you know, about the baby, until some time later.’ She reaches towards the water on the table before her. The ice has melted. Brushing away a tiny fly on the beaker’s rim, she takes a sip.

  ‘Upset me?’ Katy cries, tears of relief now burning her eyes at the possibility that Jude could have been pregnant before that dreadful afternoon. ‘How could that have upset me?’

  ‘Well, it’s upsetting you now, isn’t it?’ her mum replies gently, reaching out to squeeze Katy’s hand. ‘And it’s more than twenty years after the event. Really, where is Joyce with that coffee, you look all washed out! Katy? What’s the matter, you look awful. Tell me, please.’

  ‘Sorry Mum … It’s just … I feel so … responsible. I thought it was all my f-fault.’

  Diane clicks her tongue in frustration. ‘What,
Jude getting pregnant? Don’t be so ridiculous. How? Honestly, sometimes you really can be such a silly girl. From what I heard she was in a relationship with a friend of her mum’s.’

  There is silence once more as Katy trawls her memories for anything useful that might back this up. She knew that her friend had had a string of boyfriends: an array of fifth and sixth formers from a neighbouring boys’ school, and a scattering of students from the local tech. She knew, too, that Jude had slept with a number of these – an open secret she had rarely tried to conceal; a valued currency when it came to dealings with her classmates. But an older man … surely she would have known if her friend had been going out with someone that much older?

  Then again, Jude had grown increasingly distant and evasive over the weeks running up to her disappearance. So secretive that Katy had found it difficult to know when she was telling the truth. Like the time at camp when she challenged her about sneaking off grounds out onto the heath at the heart of the Devil’s Punch Bowl, alone. Because there was someone else, wasn’t there? Out on the heath that day. A figure she’d seen in the distance. Katy stares thoughtfully at the blunt-head lump on her left hand.

  Budge up, Jude had commanded that last evening, pushing herself into the seat next to hers in the lecture theatre after tea. She’d not seen Jude since the quarrel out on the heath earlier. And as she stared at her, Kat noticed the top of her friend’s I Ran The World T-shirt was puckered as if snagged by thorns. Where have you been? she whispered. But the other girl’s face gave nothing away until, a moment later, Katy’s hand was pulsing around a searing shaft of pain.

  Distracted, she hadn’t noticed the other girl’s arm move. The blue biro clutched in its fist that thrust downwards into the soft skin on the upper side of her own hand. The force of it prompted a gasp of pain she struggled to suppress as she turned towards Ruth Creighton, the girl seated on her other side. But Ruth was so enraptured by the evening’s speaker, a balding botanist from the local university, she noticed nothing. How can something so small hurt so much, she wondered, staring at the tiny circle of red around the puncture the marked the wound’s heart.

  With her right hand clamped firmly around her left, she slowly raised her head. Forcing herself to focus on the speaker. Willing herself not to cry as her friend’s mouth loomed towards her ear.

  I was here all the time, Jude hissed. So shut it, OK?

  Had she arranged to meet someone that day, out on the heath. That would explain her behaviour. But who? Not the stranger they encountered, though. Her attacker. The man who … Briefly, the familiar scene plays out in Katy’s mind. Jude crouched on the ground, fastening her bag. Watching her rise then stiffen, distracted by an unexpected sound. The man emerging from the bushes to grab Jude, abruptly. Pushing her down onto the ground. Straddling her, roughly. Forcing himself … But no, that’s not right, is it? For Jude was dragged in the bushes and that’s what made me run. In fear that he would come for me, too. For what could I do, a 16 year-old girl, brandishing a big stick. Far better to fetch help.

  Katy’s head is pounding, now. She rubs her eyes. For yet again she struggles to recall the precise chronology of events; the order of what happened when. Once more, it feels as if there’s a blockage in her head that’s obscuring her view. Countering her efforts to distinguish between what she saw before and after; confusing what was imagined and what was real. She remember the weight of something heavy swung from her right hand. Hears Jude’s voice again, too. You frigid lezzer. But why can’t she remember when Jude said that?

  ‘Listen, I know how much she hurt you, and also how worried you were about her moving away so abruptly. But it really had nothing to do with you, you know. And looking back on it, having been brought up by a mother like that with no known father, you have to feel sorry for her,’ Diane repeats, firmly. ‘Although I’ll never forgive her for leaving you like that; out on the heath and all alone.’

  Katy feels her cheeks burn. How can her mum say that, she wonders, when she’d been the one who ran away?

  A low rumble in the middle distance makes them both look up as Joyce backs cautiously through the swing door by the nurse’s station then strides towards them balancing three coffees and a packet of Hobnobs. A hot wind has begun to blow through the open window and the sky has darkened.

  ‘Goodness me,’ Joyce exclaims, as the blinds start to shiver and shake. ‘Let’s hope that’s just a storm coming,’ she smiles. ‘Not the end of the world.’

  *

  The apparent lifting of the unofficial, self-imposed Parker moratorium on excavating the past leaves Katy giddy and light-headed as she makes her way back home from Diane’s. The family has tiptoed around one another for so long that avoidance and evasion is their default position. Now, though, the thought of the arm’s length nature of her relationship with Diane – her inability to confide in her mum about what happened, Michael, anything – that came about because of this fills Katy with regret.

  Exiting the tube at Barons Court a memory stirs of when her mum and Michael first met one Sunday brunch-time over Eggs Benedict. The tight-lipped awkwardness of it had been reinforced by the setting. The soporific murmur of polite voices emanating from the tables around them in an over-priced brasserie. The obsequious nodding of the Covent Garden waiters. The starchy snobbishness of the place. All of this now makes her wince.

  Was it any wonder that the official introduction once she and Michael had become serious had ended up being as joyless as any job interview? Diane said she feared they were rushing things, of course. But when the two of them were alone together in the Ladies and Katy gently asked her whether living together for a while might have strengthened her own relationship with Charles, her mother’s tart response was as good as a mind-your-own-business as any she had had.

  Michael hardly seems the settling down type, she’d said.

  It would have made Katy cross if she hadn’t been about to move into Michael’s flat. News she had also been planning to share but would now hold back until another day. The depth of what she felt for him back then was thrilling, she thinks as she turns off the main road and onto Linden Gardens. An adventure, like a new continent to explore. But she is quickly distracted by a distant figure walking from the front door to the gate of their house, exiting through their front gate, and now hurrying out onto the street.

  The woman has come for their place, no doubt about it. And she looks familiar, too, even though Katy is still nine or ten houses away. Her build. The raven hair. The confidence of her as she moves in her emerald-coloured suit with its closely-tailored skirt riding high above the knee. Looks just like …

  Quickening her step, Katy hurries after Jude, for it is surely she, who is now striding away from her towards the far end of their street clutching to her chest what looks like a bunch of papers. What is she doing here, she wonders, irritably. Casting only a casual glance towards their house as she hurries by, Katy registers the open upstairs window. It looks like Michael is in. Did Jude come back looking for her? And if they did, did she and Michael speak? The gap between them is narrowing, but the woman ahead has stopped and now she’s climbing into the passenger seat of a car. Katy breaks into a run but as she does a stitch tears into her side.

  No, she decides, abruptly coming to a halt. She’ll not catch her now. And as she pinches her side, she is proven right as the car pulls away.

  Turning back towards their house, Katy sees another figure – Michael this time, stepping through the same front gate and onto the street. He is dressed in running gear and must already have in his headphones because when she shouts to him to wait he does not seem to hear. Instead, after a couple of hamstring stretches, he turns away then breaks into a run, back along their street towards the main road from which she’s just come.

  Damp-faced now from the heat, any energy Katy had a few minutes earlier has seeped away like spilled water. She is light-headed, too, and desperate to sit down. So she retraces her steps slowly, taking care not to rush herself
dizzy, until she draws level with the front gate. Reaching out with a shaking hand to free the latch she hesitates at the sound of a vehicle rapidly approaching from somewhere behind then coming to an abrupt halt. Through its open window comes the walkie talkie crackle of urgent voices. Only as she turns to stare does she see the flashing light.

  ‘Where is he?’ a female paramedic demands, clambering out from the passenger door. Dressed in Day-Glo yellow and hospital green, her waist length plait of jet-black hair accentuates the paleness of her determined, blunt-chinned face.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Katy mumbles.

  The other woman frowns. ‘We got a call out to this address. One of your neighbours reported a man lying in your front garden with blood coming from his head. They said he’d been attacked. D’you know anything about this?’

  Confused, all Katy can do is shake her head.

  ‘Do you live here?’ the paramedic presses on. Impatiently, she points with her thumb towards the damaged front door then casts a glance up at the upstairs windows Michael’s left open. Katy nods. ‘Know anything about this?’

  ‘No, I’ve only just –’ Katy turns away from the paramedic to scan the front garden for any sign of anything untoward that might have taken place. But as her eyes skim the dusty ground at their feet she sees only a few dried leaves and a rogue empty crisp packet sit amongst the gently expiring pot plants. Not even any remnants of the broken egg shells. Certainly no sign of any blood. ‘Are you sure they said this address?’

  The paramedic frowns. ‘Calls are recorded as well as logged, now, you know, and I’ve already double-checked. The caller was a young male who said he lived in the house opposite. He described the victim as – ’ She checks a piece of paper she’s holding in her hand. ‘– Male, tall with dark-blonde hair, resident at number 32. Said he wasn’t moving and looked in a bad way. But as you can see, when we came we found nothing.’

  She must mean Michael, thinks Katy with a jolt of panic. But that’s ridiculous, she’s just seen him leave. Glancing towards the curtained windows of the house opposite, she visualises the owners – a middle-aged couple with two teenage sons. She knows the family only by sight, but she supposes it is possible. A prank of some kind, perhaps. But then she recalls watching the family load up their car with bags to go on holiday the previous week and now, of course, by the look of the house they must still be away.