Little Liar

by Julia Gray

  One thing I did remember was Bel pleading, her voice pitched in an upwards spiral: ‘Oh, Nora, Nora, I implore-ya … please be in my play.’

  This at midnight, at 1 a.m., at 2 a.m. Promises of pedestals, of course. She seemed to have a passion for pedestals, though I didn’t know why.

  After Evie was gone, I ran a bath and soaked myself as one might pre-launder a soiled sheet. There were little cuts on my chest, as though the Midsummer fairies had pinned me down and dug in their nails. I couldn’t work out what they were, and then realised: they were from the bones of the corset-thing. My throat was sore from talking over loud music. I had a bruise on my right shin. I tried to remember how I could have gotten it. Perhaps I’d fallen getting out of a taxi, though I couldn’t be sure. And where was the corset-thing? I found it in a heap beside my bed, and wondered how best to wash it. Evie would know.

  Later on, I went for a walk. My path took me across our estate, across a couple of main roads and down to the river. The Thames always calms me. The greyish February air was cool and quite refreshing; I walked briskly, trying to clear my thoughts. The churning nausea was gone, but the horror of amnesia remained.

  I sat down on a bench and watched the river go by. A couple of tugboats were making their peaceful way upriver; on a long and brightly-lit boat, music was playing. I lost myself in the river, imagining that I was no bigger than a single molecule of water.

  And all of a sudden, it came back to me, like a fruit-machine jackpot on the P&O ferry – my response to Bel, while the Polish band played raucously in the background.

  ‘All right. I’ll do it.’

  Just then, my phone vibrated with a text. I was reminded of the many messages there had once been from Jonah Trace. Fond and friendly texts, to begin with. Intrigued. Later, quite passionate; obsessive, even. Confused texts. Angry texts. And, just before Christmas – a single, final epitaph on the gravestone of our doomed relationship: I didn’t want things to turn out this way.

  Involuntarily, I sighed. I’d be very surprised if he ever got in touch with me again. Those texts, I reflected, had been a linchpin in my version of events. Evidence of great value. They’d been very useful – edited, of course, to show him in the most unfavourable, stalkerish light. Furthermore – and this was crucial – Jonah Trace had no texts at all from me. I’d been careful to delete them all from his inbox, not too long before I called time on our relationship, lip a-tremble. Then came the event in Borough Market – stage-managed with care, planned to perfection – where he confronted me. As I knew he would do. And that was the end of it. No, Jonah; you may not have wanted things to turn out as they did, I thought. But none of it – ever – was about you, or what you wanted. I sighed again, as though the memory of the Trace Incident would leave my body in a cloud of carbon dioxide, and be gone. There was still, at the back of my mind, a hint of anxiety about Sarah Cousins and what her suspicions might be. But I was sure – pretty sure – that the episode was over.

  Looking down, I saw that the message was from Bel.

  Rehearsle on Tuesday at midday, it said. There was an address, and then a row of kisses. I thought it was charming – and perhaps a little daft – that Bel, an actress, was unable to spell ‘rehearsal’.

  I had got the impression, on the Friday night, that Bel hadn’t thought much of my clothes. And indeed, I had always made a point of not caring what I wore. But on the day of the rehearsal, when I surveyed the contents of my chest of drawers and saw the dark trousers, the long-sleeved tops in earth and stone colours, the pale T-shirts and vests, I realised they would not do.

  I rummaged in Evie’s room, unearthing a pair of purple dungarees, the legs of which I rolled up a couple of times, and a shirt with a print of penny-farthings. (I’d noticed that Bel liked patterns). Evie’s shoe size was much larger than mine; in the end, I went to Brixton market, early the following morning, and bought some pink-and-white Converse that were similar to those that Bel wore. Then I scuffed them for an hour in the park, so that they would no longer look new. I looked in the mirror and felt disgusted with myself. But it was better than the old-clad alternative.

  I knew the play was based on Cinderella, but since Bel had not sent me any kind of script to read, I’d been keeping myself busy over the past few days with other kinds of research. It seemed, from looking at the Internet Movie Database, that Bel had done only some short films for graduating directors and two series of a teen drama that had been shown on a satellite channel. I managed to see a few clips of this online. Anton Ingram’s list of production credits was so long that I limited myself, for the time being, to those which had received awards or nominations. I did something similar for Phyllis Lane. For three days I watched two or three films per day, keeping notes in a notebook of anything that particularly grabbed my interest.

  And so it was that, dressed in my different clothes and feeling much better acquainted with the work of the Ingram-Lane dynasty, I came to Bel’s rehearsal.

  It was a pub called the Four Horsemen, in a part of East London I’d never been to before. This, it turned out, was the space Cody and Bel had been discussing when I first went home with her. The pub stood on the corner of a wide, lonely street, next to a warehouse full of office furniture. The windows on the ground floor were boarded up; I wasn’t sure if I’d come to the right place, but seeing one of the doors standing open, I went in. Inside, the air smelled of old beer (I was reminded of Evie’s drinking days) and had the blood-numbing chill of a place that long stood unheated. The barstools were stacked beneath a dartboard. There was a heap of unopened letters on the bartop.

  There, at the bar, was Cody. He was eating a Müller yogurt with a plastic fork and filling in a crossword at the back of a tabloid paper. By daylight he looked older, perhaps older than Jonah Trace. He had thick, dark hair that curled tightly around his scalp, and crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes.

  ‘She’s upstairs,’ he said.

  He nodded towards a door on the window side of the bar, marked in tarnished gold UPSTAIRS. I went up a gloomy staircase, where every inch of wall space was covered in flyers for plays. At the top, another door. For a short, strange moment, I couldn’t help feeling that this was a trap of some kind. It wasn’t a rehearsal; there was no play. This pub was a makeshift temple. Bel was a High Priestess. I would open the door to find a votive altar. With a cackle and a scream, Bel would sacrifice me, and perhaps some other people, to whatever god or goddess she worshipped.

  Then, shaking my head and telling myself that I’d been watching too many movies, I opened the door.

  The room was larger than I’d imagined it would be, with spotlights on the ceiling. There were perhaps ten rows of seats, on increasingly raised levels, with a narrow central aisle. There was a small stage. The walls were burgundy in colour. The floor was polished, but there were black rubbish sacks dotted about, oozing debris. A dark-skinned girl with a long, dark plait curled around her shoulder like a pet snake was sitting cross-legged in the front row with a scroll of papers. A boy in a white shirt, black trousers and a pinstripe waistcoat was standing at the window, rolling a cigarette and talking on his phone. And on the stage were four people, two boys and two girls. Bel was perched on the edge of the stage in another kimono, a green one with dragons on the sleeves. Seeing me, she leaped up and came dancing over, hugging me as though we had known each other for our lifetimes.

  ‘Here she is!’ she cried. ‘It’s Nora, our eleventh-hour fairy – the cleverest, sweetest little darling you could ever imagine.’

  The girl with the long dark plait smiled at me. ‘I like your dungarees,’ she said.

  ‘This is Azia,’ said Bel. ‘She’s my co-writer, the narrator too. Over there on the phone is Thurston. He’s producing. And these are Jess and Chris and Zubin and Paige. Jess is Cinderella, Zubin and Paige are the stepsisters, Chris is the prince and I’m the stepmother, as you know. We’re not having a father because there’s no one to play him. And you, of course, are the Fairy Godmother
!’

  The boy in the waistcoat, having finished his phone conversation, came over and poured some whisky into a hip flask from a bottle in the corner. He smiled at me, and I saw: good dentistry, good education, good manners. ‘Would you like a drink?’ he said.

  He spoke with an American accent. I shook my head.

  ‘How is Steph?’ said someone.

  ‘Do not mention that girl’s name to me again,’ said Bel. ‘Who has a spare script for Nora?’

  ‘I do,’ said Azia, and she handed me a stapled A4 booklet. ‘Bel, it’s hardly Steph’s fault that she’s ill. Glandular fever is no joke. We don’t want any infectious illnesses anywhere near the ward.’

  Bel shrugged; I could see that she had taken Steph’s desertion personally. Then she smiled. ‘It’s much better to have darling Nora.’

  ‘Do you act?’ said the girl Jess, in a tone of voice I didn’t much care for.

  ‘Nora has trodden the boards hundreds of times!’ said Bel. ‘She’s been Eliza in My Fair Lady, and Grizabella in Cats, and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.’

  I waited for someone to challenge these blatant falsehoods, but no one did.

  ‘There’s very little time,’ Bel added. ‘We must get started at once.’

  ‘Did Bel explain why we’re doing this?’ said Azia, as we sat down in a circle and prepared to do a read-through. ‘The play is for children, you see. The children’s ward at St Michael’s hospital. My mum is a registrar there.’

  ‘And I want to do a performance here too,’ said Bel, with a wave of her sleeve and a hungry, heart-set look that I would come to know very well. ‘But the bastards are tearing it down. It’s been condemned. I think we should stage a protest.’

  ‘Let’s just stage the play,’ said Azia, ‘and go on with our lives.’

  Even as I write this now, I can feel the bubbles of terror in my marrow at the thought of standing up, assuming a voice, assuming an expression, saying lines, being seen, being heard. I must have looked comically afraid to anyone who had been watching me; I hid it as best I could, taking the opportunity to read through the whole of the play, The Belle of the Ball, while I waited for my first scene.

  The play wasn’t very long – six or seven scenes – and I judged that it would last no longer than half an hour. Overall, Bel (or her co-writer Azia) had stayed very faithful to the feel of the original French version. There was something rather elegant about the old-fashioned words, and the simple, pleasing way in which they rhymed. I supposed nowadays it was more common to make Cinderella into a comedic pantomime. Here it was a wistful love story; it was a tale of a troubling second marriage, conflict between sisters, thwarted hope and mistaken identity. I enjoyed the simplicity of it. She’d dramatised it beautifully, I realised. I felt a little shot of jealousy. Was Bel good at everything she turned her hand to, as well as being magnetic to men, and mesmerising to look at, and the daughter of famous people besides?

  It did not seem fair.

  I felt hands on me: Bel had appeared and grabbed me round the middle. She placed her palm on my stomach. ‘Breathe into here,’ she commanded. Her hair smelled of smoke and sandalwood. ‘You’re much too tense in the shoulders, sugar. Diaphragmatic breathing; that’s what you need to practise. I’ll show you properly, later. Now – this is your scene.’

  Trying to do as she’d shown me, I breathed into my middle, and then said: ‘Oh, little Cinders, why so …’

  ‘Not so fast,’ said Bel. ‘Don’t gabble.’

  I breathed again, and said:

  ‘Oh, little Cinders, why so sad?

  Could it be a dream you had –

  A nightmare, filling you with woe?

  Tell me, dear, what ails you so?’

  Bel chuckled. ‘Much better,’ she said.

  Jess and I read through our scene, and after that I wasn’t needed again until the finale. We had a short break and then rehearsed the play fully. It wasn’t hard to learn the choreography of my scenes, and once I was sure that I wasn’t making a fool of myself I found that I was able to relax.

  ‘A natural,’ said Bel. ‘You’re a natural. Just as I suspected.’

  She herself was a revelation. As the sneering, domineering stepmother, she projected a haughty hideousness that transformed her completely. It was hard not to look at her constantly, although I tried my best not to. As we ran through the play from beginning to end, again and again, I lost awareness of time and was surprised when Thurston shrugged himself into a tailcoat, threaded a rather sorry-looking carnation into one buttonhole and announced that he had to be somewhere by three thirty.

  ‘My mother’s getting remarried,’ he said. ‘I’ll be disinherited if I don’t attend.’

  ‘Who to?’ said someone.

  ‘Her divorce lawyer,’ he replied. At this, he upended the contents of his hip flask down his throat, adding, ‘But they didn’t stipulate what state I ought to be in.’

  Later on, Cody was sent out for supplies and we had a picnic on the stage: bread and olives and stuffed vine leaves from a tin. Heavy red wine. I took only some small sips, but was glad of the warmth in my throat. The room was very cold.

  ‘To Cinderella!’ said Bel, raising a plastic glass. She touched my glass with hers. ‘To my eleventh-hour fairy. I adore-ya, Nora.’

  When she looked into my eyes, I felt as though her passion – for performing, for living – was spilling into me, beguiling and unstoppable. She didn’t know me well enough, I kept thinking, to be able to say with certainty that she ‘adored’ me. And yet she seemed to believe it.

  We met again a few days later. It was, said Bel, the Dress Rehearsal, and I could see that she had gone some way towards organising costumes. I would wear my fairy outfit; Cinderella’s sisters had been similarly kitted out from Bel’s wardrobe, while the remainder of the cast had been equipped with various charity-shop findings. It was only a short performance, but Bel behaved as though we were preparing for a six-month run at the Globe. It was this intensity that I found so attractive about her; I think everyone else did too.

  We spent the whole day in the upstairs theatre at the Four Horsemen, and I found that by offering to accompany the individual people who went out on various errands, I could find out quite a lot, quite easily. I think they all appreciated my willingness to step into their production. And so they talked to me quite freely. From Zubin, whom I accompanied on a trip to buy coffees and muffins, I learned that he and Azia were involved in the same Youth Theatre group. Jess and Chris had acted with Bel in the twenty-four-hour play under the railway arches the previous year. And Bel and Azia – as I’d already guessed – were great friends.

  An hour or two later, I went out for bottles of water with Paige. Paige was intelligent, dry-witted, and rather shy. She too had acted with Bel in the past, in the teen TV drama. She didn’t do much acting any longer; she was in her first year of an English degree.

  As I’d hoped she would, she told me about Bel. Bel was brilliant at some things, useless at others; she’d been kicked out of several schools, the most recent one a fancy boarding school – one of those places with horses in a paddock, vegetable gardens – in Shropshire. It seemed Bel found it difficult to commit to things. Her predicted grades were poor, despite her intelligence.

  ‘Why doesn’t Bel act much professionally any longer?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ said Paige. ‘She’s got her A-levels to do. But to be honest, she has form. I don’t know how much I should tell you about it. Let’s just say she wrecked a very expensive set.’

  ‘Accidentally?’

  ‘Bel always said so to me, yes.’

  ‘What are her parents like?’ I asked. I didn’t want to let on that I knew much about Bel’s family, although by that time I had read several books about Hollywood, which contained quite a few anecdotes about Anton Ingram, and a biography of Phyllis Lane, to say nothing of the progress I was making with their film catalogue.

  ‘Oh, didn’t you know? Her mother was Phyllis Lane. She died
years ago.’

  I ummed in a noncommittal way.

  ‘And her dad’s a famous producer. He’s the reason why Bel’s doing this. He thinks she can’t get it together, and she’s out to prove that she can. Or something.’

  Darian arrived towards the end of the afternoon. He sat at the side of the stage, with a laptop and a portable hard drive. Glimpses of the screen revealed a complex canvas of numbers and lines and what looked like the skeletons of elongated fish. I thought I had never seen such total concentration.

  During a short break, I went over to see him. ‘May I hear some of your music?’ I asked.

  He looked up, startled by my appearance. ‘Sure. But it’s not quite right yet. And it’s not music as such. Soundscapes.’

  He handed me the headphones and I put them on.

  ‘That’s the intro,’ said Darian.

  ‘It’s … magical,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, that’s what Bel wanted. Something magical, she said. It’s not properly mixed down yet. I’ll do that this evening.’

  He played me three other short pieces, designed to fit in between the scenes. As I watched him tapping the keyboard, adjusting an echo here, a beat there, I surprised myself by feeling quite emotional. I was moved. I am drawn to passion: Darian, whose sister was as loud and dynamic as he was solemn and withdrawn, was obviously passionate about what he did. In their own ways, they all were.

  That night, as I went through Evie’s wardrobe again, wondering what else I could usefully purloin, I asked myself how I could remain friends with these people, when the play was over.

  7

  Marking the register in the morning of the day of the performance, Sarah Cousins said:

  ‘Pleasant half term, Nora? What did you get up to?’

  ‘Not much,’ I replied.

  She folded her lips into a smile. It wasn’t a nice one. I wondered whether she still saw Jonah Trace, and if they ever talked about me. I wondered if she had shared her opinion of me with any other members of staff. The way she looked at me, sometimes, made me very uneasy.