Little Liar

by Julia Gray

  He did.

  So that was what was up with Jonah Trace, his mysterious quirks, his nerves. When I said I like to read, by the way, I didn’t just mean books. I like to read people too.

  By the time he got to me, I was nearly done. I was pleased with both my pictures, with the lengths I had gone to in order to present their discrepancies. Jonah Trace stood behind me and surveyed my work.

  Then: ‘This is a joke,’ he said, so loudly that everyone – even Vanessa – looked up. ‘This is a joke, right?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Which hand did you just use?’

  ‘My right.’

  ‘These pictures are practically identical,’ he said, his voice thick with accusation. ‘So you used your right for both, did you?’

  ‘I used my left first, then my right,’ I said. I was beginning to blush. I hated blushing. It clashed unhappily with my birthmark, like strawberry sorbet scooped next to salted caramel.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to contradict you, but you plainly didn’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry to contradict you,’ I said, ‘but I did. I’m ambidextrous.’

  He breathed out heavily through his nostrils. ‘Ambidextrous,’ he repeated.

  ‘Shall I show you?’ I offered. I hate to be disbelieved. The blush was spreading, swift and feverlike, to the top of my neck.

  ‘There isn’t time. There isn’t time,’ said Jonah Trace, with disgust. He seemed to be blushing too.

  I could not help but feel that had it been Annabel, drawing Vanessa with dominant and undominant hands, he’d never have dared to challenge her.

  That night, while Evie watched Casablanca, I borrowed her laptop and spent a profitable hour on the Internet, making careful and creative searches. I wanted to know more about Jonah Trace: his interests, specifically; his background; whatever details of his life might be out there to find. Even the most basic use of search engines can yield fascinating results.

  Then, writing in my smallest handwriting on a sheet of A4, I made a list of what to do next.

  6

  The nights grew colder. Evie finished working on one ITV murder-mystery drama and started on another. In the Lower Sixth, we settled into our A-level choices. In English, we were studying the poetry of T.S. Eliot. In French, there were short stories by Maupassant to read, not uninteresting. In Art, we were making lithographs of small birds in bright colours.

  Meanwhile, Annabel finished her painting and moved on to a second. This one was on a long rectangular canvas; her preparatory sketches seemed to show a cream-coloured Georgian house set against dark green hills, with a blonde girl in a white dress in the foreground. I assumed it was Annabel herself. I imagined she was the kind of person who liked herself a good deal. It would never have occurred to me to do a self-portrait.

  There had been two more life drawing classes on Thursday afternoons; one of them I’d missed, citing, more or less truthfully, a headache. In the other I’d kept my head down, responding to the art assistant only when necessary, and drawing (if you pardon the pun) little attention to myself.

  I noticed on that Friday lunch time that Jonah Trace had not brought his moped to school. Perhaps he had taken it for repairs, or maybe he was going somewhere for the night, or for the weekend. Perhaps he knew he was going to drink a lot. I knew about this from Evie, from Old Evie, at least: that if you are going to imbibe quantities of alcohol, you may have to plan your travel arrangements carefully.

  I managed to avoid walking to the tube station with Fred and Sangeeta, telling them that I needed to fetch a few books from the library. I went to the toilets and brushed my hair. Left to its own devices, it hangs in a woody tangle down my back; brushed, it diffuses a kind of tiger’s-eye light that both my parents always said made me look like an angel. Possibly a slightly fallen one, one with singed wings, but an angel nevertheless. I added also some war paint: a burnish of lip gloss, some mascara. Not too much, of course. Then I left by the side entrance, walked round the corner, to where the roads diverge at right angles – one to the tube, and the other to the bus stops. Either route would get me home.

  I took out my phone.

  I don’t know what people did, when they wanted to look busy, in the days before mobile phones. They could have read books, of course – but I could not lounge against the wall with a book, just as Elizabeth Bennet could not talk of books in a ballroom. I needed to look like I was waiting for a call, or checking my messages, and I was prepared to linger as long as necessary. Four thirty came and went. Four forty-five … Was Jonah Trace running a club? But he only took Life Class, and that was on Thursdays.

  By five to five, I was starting to think that he’d gone the other way. There was always a chance he could have done that, but I hadn’t wanted to wait at the actual gates. It was too obvious, somehow. Our meeting needed to have the appearance of absolute chance.

  Pretty soon the last dregs of Lady Agatha’s came dribbling past: the girls from Choir, from Aikido Club, the staff. But no Jonah Trace. I shouldered my bag, stowed my phone and started to weigh up which – the bus or the tube – would be less unpleasant. I felt a twinge of something like regret: it was a Friday and I had nothing better to do than go home, to where Evie would be deep in some library book about hook-and-eye fastenings or the history of PVC. I would think about doing my homework, to get it out of the way, but I would not do it, of course, until Sunday night; I would eat Petit Filou yogurts from the fridge, although I did not especially like them.

  ‘Nora?’

  At my name, I turned, and with a slight but muscular movement that he’d almost certainly not have noticed as deliberate, I flicked my hair so that it swung round in front of me, like a matador’s cape. Like I said, when it’s brushed, my hair becomes a kind of dream-catcher of light, gauzy and burnt-umber and, in my opinion, one of my best attributes. The hair-flick may be a cheap trick, and an old one, but we must all choose our weapons wisely. I didn’t take too long about it, though. Flick, turn, smile … and—

  ‘Hey, Mr Trace.’

  And there he was, approaching, and – a good sign, this – slowing down as he neared my corner. We were just close enough to the school grounds for him still to be wearing his (metaphorical) teacher’s hat; some teachers never took them off, but I doubted he’d be one of them, with all his jovial chat about his girlfriend. He’d shared some details at the previous day’s Life Class: her name was Helen; she was also a teacher, of Modern Languages; she was allergic to his parents’ cat. I wondered whether, as a staff member, he was going to tell me to stop loitering.

  We would see.

  ‘Which way are you walking?’ he said.

  I hesitated. I realised I should have tracked his mopedless journey one time, just to see what his usual route was. Now there was only a fifty-fifty chance that I’d get it right. The flipped coin hung in the air.

  ‘To the tube,’ I said.

  ‘So am I,’ said Jonah Trace.

  And fell into step beside me.

  For a few minutes, neither of us spoke. The hostility he’d shown in class seemed not to be present at all, and I wondered why. Then I realised: he’d been told, or had decided, to be strict, especially at the start; he’d used me for target practice, and that was all. It did not make it any more forgivable, mind. Then, as we neared the shops, Jonah Trace began to talk. He asked me about my route home, which I explained. I told him where I lived, and he mentioned that he knew the estate: it was a fine example of Brutalism, he said. Had I heard of that? I had, yes.

  I asked him if he had any nice plans for the weekend, and he told me about a mate’s BBQ (two words I have never willingly used until now, ‘mate’ and ‘BBQ’) in Streatham. Everything about Jonah Trace was ordinary: his skin was ordinary, with its round rough patches on each cheek and glint of oiliness around the nose. His hair was ordinary, despite his efforts with gel, which made it look even more ordinary. His clothes (rust-red jumper, rumpled tie, white shirt, dark trousers) betrayed no personal
ity at all, although I knew that teachers often tried to promote this on purpose. His language was ordinary. His voice, with its soft round vowels that made me think of honey poured from a honeycomb, was more interesting, but on the whole, as far as I could see, Jonah Trace was nothing if not deeply average.

  ‘How about you?’ he said, as we walked past the old piano factory. ‘Have you got any plans?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ I said. ‘My mum’s working. I have a date tonight with the Alien box-set. The original quadrilogy, that is. I might not get through all of them, but there’s always tomorrow.’

  At this, he dropped his pace by a couple of beats per minute and threw me a glance that I knew without looking contained surprise, interest, pleasure.

  ‘They’re my favourite films,’ he said. ‘It’s interesting that … that you …’

  ‘What, because I’m a girl?’

  ‘No. Well, yeah.’

  ‘Ellen Ripley’s my heroine,’ I said.

  And I pressed START on my internal voice recorder, and began. I compared the relative strong points of Alien and Aliens – the first really a horror film, the second more action than horror – but how I liked both almost equally; I lamented the omission of Newt and Hicks from Alien3, and digressed into the on-set difficulties they’d had with that tricky third film. And yet, I said, it was the fourth, with its heart-tweaking final sequence, that I liked the least, that despite some standout scenes (one of the most prominent being Ripley’s discovery of her many aborted, mutant selves) I found I couldn’t enjoy it quite as much. Too much like a cartoon, I said.

  ‘I agree with you there,’ said Jonah Trace. ‘As for the rest of the franchise, well … what do you make of those?’

  I sighed dramatically. ‘The less said about them the better,’ I told him.

  ‘Spot on,’ said Jonah Trace, as I had known he would. ‘Careful now.’

  We had come to a pelican crossing. He put his hand out towards my arm as we crossed, just as he had done with Megan Lattismore in Life Class. Would he touch it? I think he thought better of the gesture: we were not at school, and I was not a child. But I’d seen him raise his arm, nonetheless, just for a moment.

  ‘You said your mother’s working this weekend. What does she do?’

  ‘She works in costume. Design, wardrobe mistressing, that kind of thing. Mostly TV, but theatre too sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, right. Did you get your love of sci-fi from her, then? Or was it from your dad?’

  I glanced at him. ‘My father’s dead,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’

  I realised that he repeated himself when he was uncomfortable.

  ‘Look,’ said Jonah Trace, when we got to the station. ‘I think we got off on the wrong foot somehow, at school. I …’

  I wasn’t sure how he planned to finish the thought and, clearly, neither was he, because he let it trail off, like a fade-to-black ending to a film. To help him out, I gave him a smile. He smiled back, and it was a nice enough smile, at first. And then I saw it again: the slipping of a mask, as he looked me over. That sleepy, lidded look, that I’d seen on him before. And then it was gone.

  ‘You’re a promising young artist, Nora,’ he said.

  ‘See you,’ I said. ‘Have a lovely weekend.’

  7

  A week after that, we were paid a visit by my Aunt Petra.

  Once upon a time, before Evie met my dad on the steps of the National Gallery (he thought she was a mime artist, apparently, and threw tulips at her boots), she had a stall in Greenwich Market where she sold handmade earrings and leather belts, and incense and Indian tablecloths, and flaky, tie-dyed candles. And she shared the running of this stall with a girl called Petra McBride. Though Petra was short and fat while my mother was beanpole tall; though Petra wore nothing but colour and my mother wore nothing but black, they essentially shared the same traits and values: compassion, freedom of expression, open-mindedness and so on. When my parents got married at a church in Rouen, Petra was Maid of Honour, resplendent in a maroon kaftan; when my father died, Petra was there at Dover to meet us. She had married a large, slow man called William Quick and moved to the Rosneath Peninsula, where they opened a kind of retreat called the Seat of Tranquillity, where, as you know, I am writing this now. Evie went there, once, after she gave up the booze, and said it was the silentest place you could ever imagine, where the only sounds were the rain and the noises in your imagination. ‘It made me want a McDonald’s so bloody much,’ she said. ‘But I felt pretty chilled out, by the end.’

  It sounded terrible to me, but I was fond of Aunt Petra. My mother didn’t have a lot of genuine friends, and on the occasions that she came to London, Petra always stayed with us. When I got home from Life Class, Evie was in a rare state of excitement, putting the best sheets on the sofa bed, and baking biscuits in Petra’s honour.

  ‘What’s she coming down for?’ I asked my mother.

  ‘She’s doing some course at the weekend,’ said Evie vaguely; she was only interested in courses if they involved beading.

  Late on Friday evening, Petra appeared at our door, with a large suitcase, two bunches of chrysanthemums and a small mixed-breed terrier on a lead. The terrier burst into the flat before his mistress, shedding a cloud of white-rat fur, and raked his little claws down the front of Evie’s legs.

  ‘You haven’t met Oscar, have you?’ said Aunt Petra.

  ‘He’s a welcome surprise,’ said Evie, who preferred reptiles.

  ‘Oh, did I not tell you I was bringing the dog? It’s just that Bill’s in Edinburgh this weekend. I knew you wouldn’t mind.’

  Over tea, she told us about her plans. Her course, she told us, was called ‘Spiritual Awareness for Beginners’, and would be held over two days at the world-renowned Institute of Psychic Development in East Finchley.

  ‘After so many years of reading about the spirit world,’ said Aunt Petra, dipping shortbread into her tea, ‘I realised I’d never investigated my own, well, psychic potential.’

  Aunt Petra, just so you know, is about as potentially psychic as a sanitary towel.

  The two-day course would cover everything, she said, from the astral planes and the chakras to the basics of telemetry, flower readings and mediumship. And all for the moderate price of £175, which would include refreshments.

  ‘Do you have a specific goal?’ I asked Aunt Petra, thinking of the Learning Objectives so beloved by my school.

  ‘Well, yes, I do. So many of the people that come to the retreat are seeking something; they seem so lost, so unable sometimes to find their own spiritual path, and I feel like I’d be able to help them better if I could point them in the right direction. Whether that’s through the Tarot, or the Angels, or some other method, I’m not quite sure. I shall do this course as a starting point, to see what talent, if any, I possess.’

  Absent-mindedly, my mother picked up Oscar the white-rat terrier and held him on her knees. I wondered what she was thinking about.

  ‘Evelyn!’ said Aunt Petra. ‘Why don’t you come too? There may still be places.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Evie, ‘I think I might. It might be interesting.’ She looked at me sideways.

  ‘No,’ I said immediately. ‘Thank you, but no.’

  They were up at six the next morning, gossiping like school-girls and making French toast and fennel tea. It reminded me how seldom I had sleepovers with Perfect, in her pink-and-gold bedroom, or Fred, who shared a room with her sister, or Sangeeta, who hated mess. It occurred to me, as it had done before, that Evie would make a better teenager than I would.

  ‘Now, Nora,’ said Aunt Petra, ‘I’m leaving you in charge of Oscar. Is that all right?’

  I looked bleakly at Oscar’s stuffed white face. He looked back at me with distrust. ‘Sure,’ I said.

  What, I wondered, would she have done if I’d said no? Taken him with her, I supposed. While they clattered about, putting on coats and shoes, packing water bottles and books to read on the bu
s, I entertained a vision of a circle of earnest men and women, each ready to embark on his or her path towards Spiritual Awareness, and Oscar right at the centre, with his eyes closed in silent meditation.

  Aunt Petra explained to me the schedule of Oscar’s needs, from what and when I had to feed him to how long he preferred to spend walking in order to evacuate his bowels.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ I said, not really listening. ‘Don’t worry.’

  They’d be back in time for dinner, they told me. My mother – unusually – kissed me goodbye. Then they were gone, and I was left alone with a pink-eyed, ferret-faced dog, who hated me. As soon as the front door swung shut, he leaped proprietorially onto the chair I usually sat in and growled softly whenever I approached. I wasn’t fussed; we did not need to be friends. I did a little more work on Evie’s laptop. Then I went back to bed and slept for a couple of hours. It was the start of half term and I had no interest in being up early.

  When I woke, Oscar was sitting on my bedroom floor, with the same distrusting expression; I interpreted it this time as hunger. I offered him a bowl of something that looked like hole-less Cheerios, which he ate with enormous enthusiasm. I cleared his bowl away. He was still looking at me with a distrusting expression.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said.

  He immediately launched into a tribal dance, circling crazily on his hind legs like a wind-up circus toy. I clipped his lead to his collar, and he began to bark with a kind of urgent, high-pitched quack. A baby in the flat beneath us started to wail.

  ‘Shut up, shut up,’ I hissed, toeing him out of the door.