Little Liar

by Julia Gray

  I sat back on my heels. It wasn’t a surprise. The indomitable Caroline Braine was now involved in the situation; it had, I realised, only been a matter of time before the other shoe dropped. So to speak.

  Which meant that before we went in, I’d have to explain matters to my mother.

  Evie never came in to school; she wasn’t hands-on in that way. She herself had had a chequered education; it was only after my father died that she went to college to study textiles and costume design. Her own memories of school seemed to be a catalogue of boys and cigarettes and punk rock; teachers were idiots or enemies, and the system only existed to be undermined. In her hooded cloak and lace-up boots, she looked almost beautifully out-of-place as we approached the main gates.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Norie-girl,’ she said.

  The winds were up; the sky had an ice-clear January chill about it, like a Snow Queen’s mirror.

  ‘Just tell them exactly what you told me, and everything will be fine.’

  ‘I already have,’ I said. ‘I told my form tutor the whole story.’

  My mother reminded me of the White Witch on the verge of battle. The gates loomed above us, and she prodded the bell. ‘I’m livid, by the way,’ she said. ‘But don’t worry. I’ll behave. Otherwise I’d have brought my pattern-cutting scissors for his balls.’ As we waited for the gates to open, she added, ‘But I’m always livid. Right? Livid means white.’

  True: she is always of a tomblike paleness. But I explained to her that livid, as in a livid bruise, is purplish blue, not white. I’m better with words than Evie. She reached for my hand; I counted the bones in hers, and we went up the steps together, one at a time, with synchronised feet.

  We were met by the school secretary at the big oak door, who greeted us quite formally. She showed us into the Head’s office, a place I’d only been to once, a long time ago, for an interview before I became a pupil. Without the sound of six hundred stampeding girls, chattering in their birdcall voices, clattering in their thick-soled shoes, the building felt larger, colder, unfamiliar. I felt like I was going for my interview, aged ten, all over again. And, of course, this was an interview.

  Inside the office was arranged a panel of people, as much like the row of judges on a TV talent show as anything else. There was Caroline Braine, the Head, and my form tutor, Sarah Cousins, and a tall grey man who introduced himself as Director of the Board of Governors. They were seated around Mrs Braine’s desk in a kind of semicircle. Evie and I were invited to sit opposite them. It was clearly not supposed to look too confrontational, but it felt confrontational nonetheless. The panel’s faces were stone-set and unmoving, and I wondered what was about to happen. I do not like situations that I cannot control.

  We were offered tea, coffee, water; we declined, and then Evie changed her mind and asked for a glass of water. She is a reformed drinker, as well as a reformed Goth, and she has a theory that if you’re in recovery you always need to be drinking something. Her tipple of choice is cranberry juice.

  I wished my mother’s heels weren’t quite so high.

  I thought: what if they don’t believe me?

  I could have frozen that frame too. The stone-set faces, the clouded window, the Aboriginal art, the plant in the corner with its plump, spiked leaves.

  Then Caroline Braine leaned forwards and began to speak.

  ‘Firstly, I should tell you that Mr Trace will not be attending this meeting. We did not think it necessary for him to be here today. We have, of course, heard Nora’s side of the story. Nora, we will not be asking you to tell it again.’

  A tossed coin flipped and flickered in the air above her head. The coin that nobody could see but me.

  ‘We have asked you here to let you both know formally that Jonah Trace will not be returning to work at the Agatha Seaford Academy. His contract has been terminated, with immediate effect.’

  My mother reached for my hand again. She was still wearing her long black cloak; her sleeve made a scratchy sound against the arm of my chair. ‘Thank you,’ she said. This was the right thing to say.

  ‘His version of events did not tally precisely with Nora’s,’ said Caroline Braine, her voice straining under the weight of her necklace.

  ‘So the bastard denied it,’ said Evie. This was not the right thing to say. Don’t swear, please, I willed her, inside my head. But no one, not even the tall grey man, looked offended. Perhaps a burst of pure emotion was not unacceptable in these circumstances. What, exactly, had Jonah Trace’s version of events entailed? They didn’t say.

  Mrs Braine went on: ‘Needing, of course, to look into the matter further, we made contact with his last two placements, a school in Bath and another on the Isle of Wight. Although both had provided good references for Mr Trace before he came to us, we were told anecdotally that they had received complaints in several instances, from the girls in question or from their parents. Nothing was ever proven, but the pattern seems to be clear. In short, he may have done this kind of thing before.’

  ‘Please be assured,’ said the tall grey man, ‘that this will prompt a thorough review of our recruitment policy.’

  They retreated, all of them, into a kind of blizzard of professional jargon; I realised they were concerned we might sue them, or talk to journalists, or call the police. They wanted us to know that they were sorry. This has never happened before at our school, they said. I watched Caroline Braine’s necklace – geometric, sharp-edged, bronze – catch the light at different angles as she spoke with more and more conviction and urgency: professional misconduct; not a matter for police investigation; primary duty of care. The grey man looked as solemn and sad as a chaplain at a funeral. Only my form tutor, Sarah Cousins, remained somehow unengaged, thoughtful.

  Sarah Cousins taught biology, so I had no lessons with her. She was tall and thin and wore long scarves and knee-length skirts that displayed shapely calves. She was known as one of the ‘nice’ teachers. But she was not without a kind of internal steel. Anyone who had seen her dissect a sheep’s heart could bear witness to this. The only time we really exchanged words was when she took the register. She offered a weekly walk-in counselling service for the girls in her form, so that you could go and describe your difficulties with food or friendships or contraception or whatever. I never went, so we didn’t have the kind of chummy relationship that it was possible to have with your form tutor.

  Not long before the end of the Christmas term, she’d asked me to come and see her after school. It was important, she said. There was something we needed to discuss. When I showed up, she greeted me with crows’-feet of concern on her face. She had a pad of paper on her knee, and a pen resting in her hand.

  It was a moment I’d been expecting.

  ‘This is difficult, Nora. Sorry,’ Sarah Cousins began. ‘Someone came to me recently with a rather disturbing report. I’m keen to get to the bottom of it. Apparently, you were seen this weekend, in Borough Market. The choir was singing carols there. I don’t know if you were aware of that?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘They saw you with Mr Trace. It seemed like you were having an altercation of some kind …’ She hesitated. ‘I’d … would you be able to tell me what happened? In your own words.’

  I am superlatively good at owning words.

  I told her.

  While Caroline Braine talked, and Evie listened, thankfully contributing no further swear words, I watched Sarah Cousins’ face. I remembered our conversation from a few weeks previously. My form tutor was very quiet. She added little to the web of platitudes being spun between the chairs, and sat with her hands folded in her lap, like a Victorian schoolchild.

  After a while there were no more platitudes left. Evie and I were shown back out through the doors. My mother swept down the steps, humming the opening of The Wall by Pink Floyd. Although the sun had tiptoed out again into full view, she tugged her hood over her head in a magnificent gesture of autonomy and pulled me away with her sleeves flapping like lon
g dark wings.

  ‘Nora, I think you were bloody brave,’ she said, on the bus home. The crisis had made her more communicative: she was given to bouts of endless silence, especially when in transit.

  I traced lacy patterns in the fogged-up window of the upper deck. ‘Are you still livid?’ I asked her.

  ‘Of course I’m livid. White, purple, whatever with lividity. I see this stuff on film sets all the time,’ she went on. ‘Comments, inappropriate gestures, jokey propositions … Maybe it’s a female technician getting unnecessary hassle, maybe an actress. Most of the time it all just gets kind of swept under the rug. They’re afraid to speak out.’

  I nodded.

  ‘The fact is, he was your teacher. That makes it worse. Seriously, Norie. What you did … that must have been hard. I wish there were more people like you.’

  She stopped abruptly, and fished out a paperback book from her bag. I closed my eyes, replaying the interview again in my head. Throughout the entire thing I had said nothing at all; nothing was safest and best, I thought. But inside me, a tiny nugget, hot as desert stone, glowed gold with hidden victory.

  3

  I had no fewer than three alternative stories about my father’s death, if anyone really wanted to know (and not many people did). I viewed this as something akin to my old Choose Your Own Adventure books, where different page numbers held diverging plot strands, dependent on the reader’s choices. ‘Do you want to go deeper into the jungle? Turn to page 67! Do you want to turn back? Turn to page 68!’ Sometimes the story would end happily, and other times it wouldn’t.

  None of my stories had happy endings.

  My selection depended on the temperament of my listener as well as on my mood. Since they were asking for their own satisfaction, and not for mine, I would either thrill them with a story dovetailed to their own particular interests, or else – if I was feeling a little less sympathetic – I’d choose the one that would make them cringe the most, the one that would make them wish they hadn’t asked.

  Loosely, my three stories could be classified thus:

  Obscure Illness.

  Mysterious Disappearance.

  Unfortunate Tragedy.

  This is not the order in which they were first told, incidentally. It’s just how they seem to be listed in my head. The first one I created, I’m pretty sure, was Mysterious Disappearance. This took its inspiration from my memories of taking the ferry as a small child between Dover and Calais; I believe that the most successful inventions, even if they contain elements of the fantastical and far-fetched, must have strong authentic origins.

  This is how it goes.

  ‘We took the ferry to England from France, and back again, a couple of times a year,’ I would begin. ‘P&O, always. Massive, with great big funnels. As soon as we parked the car, I would go straight to the slot machines – on some ferries there would be a whole room, just for slot machines. I never played; I just had this weird fascination for watching other people play. The fruit machines especially. I’d stand next to the player and whisper advice. “Press HOLD now,” I’d say. “You’ve already got two cherries.” And pretty often, they’d do what I told them, maybe because they thought I was psychic. I probably looked a bit weird and other-worldly, with my birthmark, and because I was so small, and because my mother always put me in these fancy, embroidered dresses. And sometimes I got it right, and the kid would win. I was addicted to the sound of the money cascading, all chunky and satisfying, into the slot. Sometimes they’d give me twenty pence or a pound, and I’d go and buy an ice cream.’

  All this, so far, by the way, was true.

  ‘My parents liked to set up camp on the middle deck. They wanted to see the sea, and to be as far away from other people as possible. My father would drink black coffee and then complain about its poor quality. My mother would have a gin and tonic, just one, if it was after twelve. If not, she’d have tea. Then she would knit, and my father would draw, or they both would read. We played card games: Happy Families, Go Fish. Sometimes my father would take me outside, if it wasn’t too rainy or windy, and we’d look out across the Channel, and he’d sing me a song about the White Cliffs of Dover, or a French one called La Mer. He would take me up to the rails, holding my hand. “Look down, Aliénor,” he’d say. “You see the white horses? Look – they are white horses, charging through the waves, keeping pace with the boat.” He always referred to the ferry as a “boat”. And I’d look down, and gradually I began to see the horses, in the white-tipped froth that surged around the keel as the ferry cut a path through the sea.’

  All this: also true.

  ‘One evening, when I was six years old, as we were crossing towards Dover, there was a storm. I used to love storms in Paris, where – watching them from the windows of our high-up apartment – they seemed so safe. But at sea, even on those big ferries, storms were different. When this one hit, I was in the windowless games room, watching somebody shoot a miniature basketball. There was so much noise coming from the machines that for a while I wasn’t aware that a storm had begun. But when I came out into the stairwell, making my way back to where my parents were, I realised how dark the sky had grown, how the ferry had somehow become wrapped in the rustling sound of the rain. The sound was everywhere: battering the windows, the glass doors that had been closed for safety. Then the thunder started, and I scrambled up the stairs, as fast as I could, to find my mother and father.

  ‘I was halfway up as my mother came down, calling for me.

  ‘“Where’s your father, lovie?” she said.

  ‘I told her I didn’t know.

  ‘“He went to look for you,” she said, “when the storm began. But that was a while ago now.”

  ‘Keeping hold of my hand, she led me on a search of the ship. We looked everywhere: the cafeteria, the toilets, the games room, the shop. We went down to the parked cars and threaded our way in and out of them, as though we were playing a game, and as we went we called for him. Every staircase. Every doorway.

  ‘And then: “We must find a steward,” my mother said. “We must tell them that someone is missing.”’

  I had several minor variations on what happened next. In the first tellings, I described how my mother and I managed to break open the locked doors onto the deck and pulled ourselves along the wall by the rope, hair slicked horizontal by the wind. Our screams wrestled with the sounds of the storm. Sometimes, I said that we saw – far off, almost impossible to make out – what looked like a human head in the water. Other times I said that we saw another shape with him, something dark and looping and tangled: a sea snake, a monster. But that would have been more appropriate for Greek waters, I decided later; I did not like to test the credulity of my audience. Once, I said that we saw my father fall from the railings of the deck. Generally, however, I enlarged upon the agonies of our quest, how the stairwells echoed with our calling, and how various Good Samaritans joined in the search.

  The ship docked at Dover, and the police came, and each passenger was asked their name on departure, and a thorough search was conducted.

  And there was no sign of Felix Tobias, forty-seven years old, of French nationality.

  There was no sign at all.

  4

  I have a certain talent for negativity. It’s subtle enough not to be that noticeable the first time you meet me. My face, although imprinted with a starfish-or-France-shaped birthmark, does not have the downturned eyes and mouth of a habitually sad person. But sad people, negative people, should not be defined by such basic landmarks. A tone of voice can be misleading. Or the way a curtain of hair falls to the shoulders, the way it moves when a person shakes or nods their head. Perhaps I will go so far as to say that I believe that it is almost impossible to spot a real interior sadness, unless you are gifted with unusual empathy, or have been a witness to something in that person’s life. With my father, and my mother too, I have been a witness.

  But who is my witness? Partly, maybe, that is why I am writing this now. Yo
u, the reader, are invited ringside, or to the one-way glass of my cell. To my sadness. And because I have assured you that what I am writing is the truth, you are invited to believe me. One clue, by the way, is in my name. Long ago, I parted with my birth name, Aliénor. Teachers at all points in my English education made me sound like athlete’s foot cream or air freshener. Disliking variations on the theme of Allie, I settled for Nora because it had an undertone of denial that pleased me. It sounded like both nor, as in neither/nor, and ignore. It suggested negative space: a yawn of air between rigid shapes.

  Nora is not-being. Nothingness. Thank you, but no.

  And so: one aspect of my Nora-nature is my tendency to define myself in negative terms. ‘That’s not my favourite genre,’ I will say, to the friend who eagerly proposes a rom-com or a musical. ‘I’m not very good at making this,’ will preface whatever I’m about to cook and serve to a guest. I know a lot about what I don’t want, what I don’t like, what I am not.

  I do like to read, by the way. And I like to swim. I am not without occasional sparks of positive interest. Another thing I do – and maybe ‘like’ is the wrong word for it, and maybe it isn’t – is tell lies. I certainly have a talent for it. People tend to believe me. There are plenty of small histories I can relate, in which I am believed. The day that Evie and I were called in to Caroline Braine’s office was, as I have explained, a victory. They believed me. Mr Trace did not have a leg to stand on, not unlike the computer table upon which I am writing this now.

  But perhaps you would like to know what actually happened.

  I shall explain.

  Flip the calendar back to September. A fortnight in, and the school term is already slipping into a familiar routine: wood polish and steamed carrots and fire drills. Picture me here. Oh: you do not know what I look like, apart from my birthmark. Sorry. I am small, with a ringletty mass of leonine curls, and in fact a rather leonine face; I would look good with whiskers. I am coming down the stairs with my three obligatory friends: Perfect Melody Wilson, Frederika Olsson and Sangeeta Lakhani, and we do not need to dwell upon my three obligatory friends at this point, because they are just about to go home.