Little Liar

by Julia Gray

  I hesitated.

  Having thumped and texted to her heart’s content, Annabel now began to write. As I continued to reread those self-same lines, I found myself increasingly fascinated – and impressed – by the speed with which she was working. She used a proper fountain pen, which she dipped from time to time in a bottle of ink. This fascinated me too. My father had used a similar method. It’s funny: as I write this now I find I get faster and faster, but still there’s a stop-start hesitancy to the way I write. I pause, I judge myself, I correct and delete. Annabel just wrote, with expansive sweeps of her arm. The sleeves of her blue kimono rustled as the pen kept up its soft scratch-and-scribble, and her boot kicked against the leg of her chair, and from time to time she’d reach for another sweet and chew it with relish, and she mouthed as she wrote as though it were some kind of spiritual music. And after a while I found that it was no longer unbearable at all.

  I longed to know what it was that she was writing. Surely she would get up to fetch a book, or to go to the toilets? I turned the pages of my poetry anthology at random, sometimes highlighting occasional words or phrases, but without much of a sense of what I was doing.

  Annabel abruptly scraped back her chair and got up. She went over to a bookshelf and returned with a thesaurus, which she leafed through with what looked like increasing frustration. Wanting to appear busy, I carried on with my work. Sometime later, I felt sure that Annabel was watching me. I looked up to see delphinium-blue eyes waiting to meet mine.

  ‘’Scuse me, sweetheart. D’you fancy helping me with something?’ She shuffled through her pages until she found the one she wanted. Pointing with her pen nib, she said: ‘Can you read from here?’

  Mindful of the librarian, I read in a whisper:

  ‘A suit of golden silk you’ll wear

  With silver star-flowers in your hair …’

  ‘Louder,’ said Annabel.

  The librarian advised the room that we had five minutes left.

  ‘Damn!’ said Annabel. ‘What are you doing this evening? Could you – could you possibly come round to my house? I shall be eternally grateful, and make a pedestal of roses and pomegranates for you to sit on.’

  ‘I’m busy this evening,’ I said. ‘I’ve got Life Class.’

  ‘Can’t you skip it?’

  ‘Shush,’ said the librarian.

  ‘How about tomorrow, then?’ said Bel.

  ‘What for, exactly?’ I said.

  ‘I need you to read more,’ she said.

  I paused, and then – perhaps it was the mention of reading that did it, for there are few verbs that I love more in life than ‘to read’ – I agreed. At once, her face lit up with the luminosity of a planetarium ceiling.

  ‘You’re marvellous!’ she said. ‘You’re too kind. Meet you outside the gates? I’m Annabel, by the way, Annabel Phyllis Ingram, at your service.’

  ‘Nora,’ I replied. I got the impression that she had never been, and never would be, at anyone’s service but her own.

  ‘You can call me Bel,’ she added.

  I watched her tip her possessions into her bag and leave, light of foot in her untied shoes. She did not walk, so much as skip. I had never seen someone so comfortable in their own clothes, their own skin, apart from, perhaps, Aunt Petra.

  2

  Of course, as soon as I accepted Annabel’s invitation I wondered what on earth I was doing. I was not in the habit of saying yes to people (with one notable exception). It had, I thought, something to do with a conversation I’d had with Evie the previous weekend. My mother had noticed that I seemed generally despondent. She took me, on one of her infrequent days off, for a manicure. Evie favoured the kind of nail bar with shouty neon signs and a cash-only register: not too fancy, a little grubby, full of old magazines.

  ‘You can have any colour you like, as long as it’s black,’ she joked. She always said the same thing.

  I did choose black, just to amuse her; the bottle was semi-stuck to the shelf, dusty with disuse. Only a centimetre of varnish remained in the bottle. Evie, halfway down a syrupy latte, chose pale pink. We took our bottles over to where the manicurists waited. They looked like sisters, dark-eyed, dark-haired.

  I admired my mother’s slender fingers, so suited to the life of a violinist, or indeed a dressmaker, which was what she had become. On the knuckles of her left hand was the word LOVE. On the knuckles of her right hand was the word HAT. When asked about it, Evie would usually say that she changed her mind at the very last minute; she realised that she could not bear to have the word HATE on her body, so the tattooist left it at HAT. And there was nothing wrong with a good hat; she herself had plenty of them.

  ‘It’s knocked the joy out of you, this whole thing with the art teacher,’ she said, as our manicurists – working in perfect synchrony – soaked off the last scraps of old polish from our fingernails. ‘Hasn’t it?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  I held out my hands and watched my cuticles vanish. It was my most detested part: the cutting of the cuticles. My mother was right, but not for the right reasons.

  ‘What you need,’ said Evie, ‘is a distraction. Something to take your mind off things at school. Something amusing.’

  I had a brief vision of us both at Disneyland Paris: me watching jadedly as my mother stalked like Maleficent down the central avenue in one of her velvet cloaks, flaring her LOVE HAT hands, scattering terrified children in her wake. Us at The Lion King, singing along to Hakuna Matata; us shopping in Oxford Street for matching zebra-stripe onesies.

  ‘A manicure is amusing enough,’ I said. ‘Promise.’

  ‘What about a course at the Psychic School place? They keep emailing me with special offers.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Or, even better,’ said my mother, ‘you need to fall in love. Love is the ultimate distraction.’

  So saying, she knocked her coffee onto her lap, swore, and lost her train of thought entirely.

  And so, not far from where I had once loitered in anticipation of Jonah Trace, I waited outside the school gates at the end of the next day for Annabel Ingram to arrive. Arrive she did, though curiously late, trailing scarves and bags and spilling things, as was her wont, from every pocket. It was a gold kimono today, with a white-and-silver print of Chinese pagodas.

  She looked taken aback when I greeted her, as though she had forgotten. ‘Oh, yes! Of course,’ she said. ‘Howdy. I’m just waiting for my car.’

  I found this very odd. Did she have a personal, uniformed chauffeur? I didn’t know what to say as we waited together by the wall. We could hardly talk about the weather. At last Bel made an exclamation and a battered Ford Focus neared the kerb; raising a silky arm in greeting, she grabbed me with the other and drew me towards it. She climbed into the passenger seat; I hesitated, then opened the rear door and got in. A boy – a man, really – of about the age of Jonah Trace was at the wheel.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Bel.

  ‘Going home?’ said the man-boy. He had a low voice and a bit of an accent, but I couldn’t quite tell what it was.

  ‘Yup,’ said Bel. ‘Nora, Cody. Cody, Nora,’ she added.

  The tobacco smoke in the car was so thick that I could almost see it; it crept into my throat like a salt-marsh fog, making me cough. I cannot stand people smoking; it is one of many personal habits that I dislike. As Cody lit cigarettes for himself and for Bel, I was beginning to be sure that this was a very bad idea.

  ‘Thank Christ it’s half term,’ said Bel.

  ‘I went by the theatre this afternoon,’ said Cody, as we joined a queue of cars at the traffic lights.

  ‘Did you see Lex? Can we use the space?’

  ‘He says if we lock up and don’t trash it, then OK. But there’s no running water, no heating.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Bel.

  They continued their conversation, which excluded me. It seemed to involve printing programmes and making sure various people
knew what was happening on a certain date.

  ‘Darling,’ said Bel. ‘We are being very rude. I am sorry.’ She swivelled around and bestowed a glittering smile upon me. ‘Tell me all about yourself, Nora,’ she began.

  ‘This traffic is shit,’ said Cody.

  ‘Take a detour, then.’

  ‘What kind of detour?’

  Bel banged her head lightly against her headrest, as a child might do. She threw her cigarette out of the window, opened the glove compartment and fished out a packet of sweets. ‘I don’t know. You know these things.’

  Her phone rang; the ringtone sounded like old-fashioned carnival music.

  ‘Azia, honey!’ said Bel, picking up.

  I couldn’t hear the voice on the other end, but it was obviously not good news: Bel continued to bang her head as the conversation continued.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she was saying. ‘Thurston called. This week of all weeks, for heaven’s sake. Have you seen her? How did she look? Well, I hope she’s at death’s bloody door. Maybe I’ll send Cody round to break her legs.’

  I looked at the back of Cody’s head, but he did not react to this; I presumed it was a joke.

  ‘It was a joke,’ said Bel, at that moment. ‘Anyway, sugar, I must go. I have a car-guest. And a Plan B. I’ll tell you later.’

  She hung up the phone, stuffed another handful of sweets into her mouth, swivelled round again and winked at me.

  ‘Never attempt anything without a Plan B. That’s what my dad always says.’

  Bel lived on a hill-slope street in Wandsworth, not far from the common, called Rosewood Avenue. It was long and winding, and full of tall, grey, terraced houses, set back from the road and rather Gothic in appearance. Issuing various instructions to Cody about where she wanted to go later on, and at what time, Bel got out of the car, not looking out for traffic as she did so. Then, holding my hand, she led me down the black-and-white tiled path to the door. It amused me to see that a key was kept under a potted plant.

  ‘Home!’ she yelled.

  She pulled me over the threshold, and the hall was as much like Alice’s well as anything I’d ever seen. A long mirror gave the impression of greater space; an apothecary cabinet on the opposite wall overflowed with curious, nonsensical items. Directly in front of us was a flight of stairs; she led me past them and down the hall to a big, somewhat dilapidated kitchen.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘I think everyone is out.’

  The floor of the kitchen was black-and-white tiled, as the path to the front door had been. It was as though visitors were expected to jump into a game of chess in every room. Spider plants in wicker baskets hung from the ceiling, as did one of those large, rather frightening clothes-drying racks. There was a red cooking range, a free-standing fridge, a large painted dresser and a central island with a scarred surface. On one side, a rectangular dining table stood beneath a crowded windowsill, and beyond it a flight of steps led down to a conservatory full of rattan furniture and more spider plants. Beyond, I could see a garden with a small pond at the end.

  Bel poured me a tumblerful of gin, adding tonic and ice and a slice of lime. ‘First drink of the day,’ she said.

  While her back was turned, I was able to pour most of it into the sink and refill the glass with water.

  I longed to see every room, but she led me upstairs, chattering manically all the while. Up to the third floor we went. Splashing gin every few steps, Bel opened a door at the top of the house.

  ‘This is my lair,’ she said.

  I was reminded of Evie’s room in her darker days. Every surface was decked with clothes and scarves; necklaces lay on the floor in little heaps, as though stowed there by magpies; hats were piled in corners. In the corner was a four-poster bed, an antique one. A plaster model of a Venus flytrap sat malevolently beside it. Theatre programmes littered the floor, and posters for films and plays of which I’d never heard covered the walls. Next to the window was a full-size skeleton dangling from a metal stand. It wore a striped tie and a chain of Hawaiian flowers. The air was stale.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Bel. She touched her glass to mine, then climbed onto her bed, pulling apart the heavy chintz-like curtains as she did so. ‘Come in!’ she said. ‘Come into my parlour. I don’t bite.’

  This was very much not my kind of thing. As I’ve said before, I don’t like cuddles, proximity, sharing and so forth. But I felt the inclination to do what she did. So I giggled and climbed up, kicking off my trainers.

  ‘Tell me everything, Nora. What’s your middle name?’

  ‘Alison,’ I said.

  ‘Favourite colour?’

  ‘Blue.’

  ‘Star sign?’

  ‘Virgo.’ This last I said randomly, reaching for the first zodiacal element that came into my head. I didn’t see why I should divulge my real one, which was Pisces.

  ‘Why are you wearing black nail varnish?’ asked Bel.

  ‘Because it’s cheerful,’ I said.

  She smiled; I noticed that she was missing a tooth on her upper left side. Sometime later I learned that she’d killed the nerve with regular cigarettes.

  ‘D’you have any pets?’ she said.

  ‘None.’ I thought of rat-dog Oscar, and was glad of this.

  ‘We have a cat. Cleopatra. You’ll meet her later. What’s your secret weapon against the world?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I said.

  ‘What can you do? What’s your best thing? The thing that makes you completely you, the thing only a Nora can do?’

  This was not a question I felt I could answer. It was far too intrusive. ‘What’s yours?’ I retorted.

  ‘I,’ said Bel, ‘am a child of the theatre. It’s in my bones, my blood and my soul. In fact, that’s what I wanted you for. You know the thing you read to me in the library? Well, it was an adaptation of Cinderella.’

  I nodded. ‘Cendrillon,’ I said. I used the French name for it; my father had read me Perrault’s fairy tales many, many times.

  ‘D’you like fairy tales?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘I just adore them,’ said Bel. Her eyes had grown rounder and rounder until I could almost see, reflected in them, the princes and castles and monsters of her imagination.

  ‘I had a story-tape of them, when I was little,’ she said. ‘The woman reading the stories, her voice was like yours: so calm. She sounded a lot like my mama. They used to make me feel so safe.’

  I did not know the recording she meant, but I could imagine well enough the kind of voice she was remembering. ‘You said you wanted me to read some more,’ I said, prompting her.

  At once, she leaped up and rummaged through the bag at the foot of her bed until she found the green-inked manuscript. ‘Yes siree. I certainly would. From …’

  She ran her fingers down a page.

  ‘… here. That’ll do nicely. Just read until I tell you to stop.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’

  She wriggled down under the duvet, clutching a stuffed leopard and her tumbler of gin, her eyes fixed on my face. ‘Fire away,’ she murmured.

  I scanned the page, and began to read. The adaptation was all in verse, light and sparky. It was a pleasure to say aloud, and I read the whole of the page, and then the next, until Bel said:

  ‘Nora, Nora. Your voice … it’s magical.’

  ‘Would you like me to read more?’ I said.

  ‘Not from the page. Can you … I just really wanna hear the whole thing now. Not in verse, not a play script, but the story. Like on the tape. D’you think you can do that? You know, in your own words.’

  For Narrative Nora, there is no more tempting invitation.

  ‘Once, long ago, there was a man who married for a second time, and she was the haughtiest, most arrogant woman you ever saw …’ I began, keeping my voice low and rich and consistent.

  I told her the story of Cinderella. Sometimes, as I was speaking I became my father, with his French-accented wh
isper; at other times I was Nana, in full storytelling mode. At other times, I was someone else entirely, someone I didn’t know.

  After a while, I realised that Bel was asleep. I waited until her breath was a gentle rush and fade. Then I prised the tumbler from the crook of her elbow and removed my leg from beneath her hand. There was a rash of cigarette burns around one of her wrists: it looked more like the markings of frequent accidents than deliberate action. I picked my way through the clothes – Bel might act like a child, but she had a large quantity of very expensive underwear, I saw, much of it from Agent Provocateur – and left her bedroom, closing the door quietly behind me.

  3

  When you are alone in an unknown house, and your hostess is dead to the world, and you wish to explore but are not so well acquainted with the family that it wouldn’t look very odd if anyone came back and caught you poking around, you must allocate your time very carefully.

  That is a truth universally acknowledged.

  I looked first for a bathroom; a guest can always legitimately look for a bathroom. The door opposite revealed only a linen cupboard. I went down the stairs to the floor below. Here I discovered the bathroom that must be used by Bel. There were more black-and-white tiles, and more spider plants. A claw-footed bath with a brass curtain rail took up most of the space; lined up alongside the edge were some antique-looking toys: a red, smiley-face apple, a diver on a board, a set of plastic ducks. The cabinet was not locked, but I found only the usual medications. I blew my nose and caught sight of my reflection, watching me in the mirrored cabinet door. For a moment, it looked like my birthmark was on the wrong side, which startled me; then I saw that it was the shadow of one of Bel’s kimonos, slung over the top of the door.

  Next to the bathroom was another door, locked.

  I went down another flight of stairs. Film posters, framed and unframed, met my eye at every angle. I studied them. Evie and I watched a lot of films, and a lot of television too. But I did not feel my knowledge was comprehensive; I had not heard of all the films on the posters, although I felt that I should have. There were, however, a few that I knew were ‘cult’ films, particularly from the late 1980s and 1990s. I lingered to look more closely, hoping for a pattern to emerge.