Little Liar

by Julia Gray

  ‘That wasn’t necessary, though,’ Anton went on. ‘As a gesture.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Making your hair like Mama’s. It wasn’t necessary. Because …’ He brought out from beside him a thick booklet of white A5 paper, solidly bound. JACARANDA, it read, in Courier font, together with the writer’s name, GABRIEL GLASS, and the date, and the words FIFTH DRAFT.

  ‘Daddy!’ said Bel.

  ‘You’ve earned it,’ said Anton. ‘I just want you to read it through, for now. Confidential as ever, of course. Read it and let me know if you still want the part.’

  ‘Want it!’ said Bel, in a full, small voice. ‘Of course I want it.’

  ‘There’s a couple of people I’d like you to meet, but we’ll talk about that another time. For now, I just want you to know that all your efforts have not been in vain.’

  ‘Does this mean it’s definite?’ asked Bel.

  He smiled, handing her the script. ‘It’s a definite … maybe. You still have your exams to get through.’

  ‘A toast,’ said Bel. ‘To Jacaranda.’

  ‘To Jacaranda,’ her father solemnly replied.

  Darian took a long sip of beer. Wryly, he raised his glass too. It seemed the Ingram family were always drinking toasts of one kind or another.

  ‘Oh, and to Nora too,’ said Bel. ‘I nearly forgot.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Anton. ‘I don’t think you’d have managed those grades without your loyal Nora.’

  ‘Nora is playing the lead in a little school production of A Doll’s House,’ Bel said, patting my arm. ‘So clever.’

  ‘Indeed?’ said Anton, again. ‘Well done, Nora. That’s excellent news.’

  I couldn’t help but feel that I was being very subtly patronised. Darian, meanwhile, gave me a smile that managed to be both sympathetic and conspiratorial. I returned it gratefully.

  Seeing us, Bel said, ‘Get a room, kids.’ Her hair eddied from side to side as she laughed.

  Raw fish does not agree with me. That night, staying over at Bel’s, I had another dream about the flowers. I was walking, with difficulty, through a dark place with an uneven floor. The flowers were strewn like corpses to my left and right. A faint shimmer came off them. Red and blue, green and yellow, orange and turquoise and indigo. I knew with certain dream-knowledge that this was a place of indescribable danger. The flowers swelled bigger and bigger as I passed, until eventually there was no path ahead. And now the thorny, ribbony tendrils came reaching around me, caressing my legs, my waist, steadfast as straitjackets.

  And then the flowers were gone, as though they’d never been there, and I was lying on a trolley in some white-lit hospital corridor. Orderlies with clipboards tap-tapped the floor as they passed me. Why was I there? With difficulty, I struggled to a sitting position. I seemed to be wrapped in bandages, like a mummy.

  ‘Poor thing,’ said a voice in French. ‘She ate a bad oyster. We had to amputate the arm at the elbow.’

  I looked around, to see who the voice was talking about. Then – wanting to be sure – I looked down at my body. There were so many bandages, twisting this way and that like tapers, that I couldn’t really see myself. Was that my thigh? Was that my ankle? As is often the case in dreams, I could feel nothing. Then an orderly came and wheeled the trolley, slowly at first, and then faster, until we came to a mirrored door. I looked up. The orderly wore a surgical gown; he had brown hair under his cap and a scrubbed, boyish face. He didn’t look identical to Jonah Trace, and yet I knew that he was Jonah Trace, without doubt.

  ‘Poor, poor thing,’ he said again in English.

  Slowly I redirected my gaze, until finally I could see myself in the reflective door. I looked utterly ravaged by disease, my face hollow, my eyes dull. Where skin was visible beneath the bandages, I saw that it was red-raw with infection. And my left arm was, indeed, gone.

  I woke up with a scream.

  Bel was there, perched on the camp bed in her room where I always slept, leaning over me, peering into my face. Her bedside light was on. She had a tumbler of brandy in one hand and a thermometer in the other.

  ‘Sushi,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus, Nora honey. You scared the life out of me.’

  ‘Just a dream,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t eat sushi.’

  She took my temperature, shaking the digital thermometer vigorously as though it contained mercury. I looked around for something familiar, something comforting. Bel’s copy of the Jacaranda script lay on the floor between the camp bed and the four-poster; next to it, face-down, forlorn – as if to highlight its lesser importance – was my copy of A Doll’s House.

  Bel scrutinised the thermometer. ‘Normal,’ she said.

  She offered to read me a story, but I told her I was fine. Eventually, she climbed back into bed and fell asleep almost at once. I lay awake, listening to Bel’s breathing, and the nocturnal grumblings of the house, my mind a kaleidoscope of flowers and oysters and sushi, and unanswered questions and unfinished thoughts.

  8

  I went home the following day. Evie was due back next week, and I wanted to buy food, washing-up liquid, get the flat in welcoming shape. Bel, I could see, was desperate to read the Jacaranda screenplay, and although I would have liked to be involved – I wanted to read the script too, very much – she did not ask me for my input.

  I sat on our balcony in the spring sun, going through A Doll’s House, making notes as I went along, as I knew Phyllis Lane had done. I wondered if Bel was doing the same, and thought she probably wasn’t.

  My phone vibrated and I felt a stomach-dropping sickness, anticipating perhaps a message from an unknown number. The text was from an unknown number, and for a moment I didn’t quite understand it.

  Hey, wife. Would you like to go swimming this afternoon?

  I’m heading to the leisure centre at 2 p.m.

  Then I realised it was from Megan Lattismore, who was playing my husband Torvald. I didn’t know Megan swam; I’d thought she was more of a track-and-field girl. I realised, as I got to the pool – the same one that we used at school – that I’d missed swimming regularly in my free time. It wasn’t something Bel was especially into.

  Megan and I shared a lane, and although she was taller than me, I was faster, so we were pretty well matched. The chlorinated water felt good on my skin as I alternated front and back crawl. My goggles dug into my nose and I stopped to adjust them.

  ‘You’re an amazing swimmer,’ said Megan, stopping also.

  ‘You aren’t bad either,’ I said.

  Megan said she was training for a triathlon. She was what you might call a good all-rounder: the kind of person anyone would be glad to have on any kind of team. As we to’d and fro’d like synchronised sea lions, I tried not to look at the gallery, where Sarah Cousins had accused me of being a little liar. That memory still burned uncomfortably bright.

  Megan and I swam seventy-six lengths. Afterwards, we went for coffee and post-training brownies. We discussed the play and I quickly realised that Megan Lattismore had no actorly ambitions beyond the Agatha Seaford Academy.

  ‘Plays,’ she said, emptying four packets of sugar in little mounds around her saucer in a kind of strange, subconscious ritual. ‘They look good on your UCAS application.’

  Her parents, she said, were very hot on things looking good on UCAS application. I remembered that her father was a school governor – although not, I thought, the one who’d been at the meeting with Caroline Braine in January. For a while I dwelt again on the Trace Incident, as I tended to do when I wasn’t with Bel and distracted by Bel-ish things like Jacaranda.

  As though reading my mind, Megan surprised me by saying: ‘He brought you here, didn’t he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Trace.’

  I stared at her. I remembered the way he had patted her arm, and the way he had looked down her shirt. It was that look – sleepy and lidded and secret – that told me everything I needed to know about his psychology. I won
dered how she knew. But then, it wasn’t exactly a secret. I’d told a few people. Lori, for example. Although I might have told Lori that it was Nero we went to, or Eat or Pret. To my horror, I found that I could no longer easily recall which cookie-cutter coffee shop our former art assistant had chosen.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, at last. ‘When he asked me out.’

  I opened a packet of sugar and poured it into a sacrificial heap, adding to the mounds around Megan’s saucer.

  ‘What exactly did he say?’ she said.

  Megan was a frank kind of person, from what I could see. Was this a test of some kind? Or did she just want to hear the story in my own words?

  ‘Just that he really liked me, and he wanted to get to know me better,’ I said.

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I told him he must be totally crazy.’

  Megan Lattismore had a very oval, symmetrical face. With her flaxen hair and forget-me-not eyes, she looked like she had some Scandinavian blood. Her low, boyish voice and perpetual air of confidence made her a good choice for the role of Torvald, I decided. I willed a pathway into her thoughts, as she looked at me over the top of her cup. Did she believe me? The pause that followed was long, and it seemed as though she were trying to decide what to say.

  Then:

  ‘What a loser,’ she said drily.

  She changed the subject.

  9

  A couple of nights later, I was woken by my phone.

  Darian’s name flashed on the screen. It was twenty to four in the morning.

  ‘Nora, I’m sorry if I woke you.’

  ‘What’s up?’ I said.

  ‘It’s Bel. She’s … I need you to come and help me. I’m sorry. I just … I can’t do this by myself. Can you get in a taxi? I’ll pay you back.’

  So much for turning over new leaves, I thought, as I hunted for my keys. Now that Bel was sure that she had – definitely maybe had – the part of Clementine, she was clearly relaxing back into her old ways. And at four in the morning, she could be anywhere. She had a fondness for breaking into high-security buildings at night; she was a nimble, athletic climber and unafraid of guard dogs or alarm systems. She might be stuck behind a set of railings, or in somebody’s walled back garden. There was a real chance that she’d been arrested; I knew that Cody, or Darian, had gone to fetch her from the police station once or twice in the past, where each time she’d been let off with a caution and warned against further disorderly behaviour. Or else she was stranded somewhere and needed to be collected. A party outside London. A date that had not ended well.

  The address he’d given me was a street not too far from where they lived. As I got out of the cab, I looked for a house with all its lights on and that unmistakable aura of a party that is down to its dregs and embers. I looked for police cars. I listened for music and screams. And I heard nothing. The street lamps were wide-spaced and gave out a foggy orange light; for a strange moment, it felt like I’d been transported back a hundred years. I realised I was just by the park nearest their house, where Bel went jogging. Then quick steps echoed on the pavement. There he was, in a white shirt and a black suit. He must have been out playing music somewhere.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ Darian said, as though I’d been invited to a party.

  The park was empty. There were few lampposts and not much moon. We walked for ten or fifteen minutes, not saying much.

  ‘Is she all right?’ I said.

  ‘She’s climbed up a tree and she won’t come down, and I can’t persuade her.’

  ‘How did you know she was here?’

  ‘She was out with Azia; they had some kind of disagreement. Bel ran away. Azia called me, but she’s gone now; I told her to go home. I can’t leave Bel there. I’m worried she’ll pass out and fall. A couple of times she threatened to jump. I figured it was you or the Fire Brigade.’

  From up high in the leaves came the sound of hiccuppy crying.

  ‘Bel? Bel, it’s me. I’ve brought someone to see you,’ said Darian. He nodded at me.

  ‘Bel, are you there?’ I called up.

  ‘I’m keen to get out of here before a warden or someone catches us,’ said Darian to me.

  ‘Bel, darling, it’s Nora. Will you come down?’

  Another, more muted sob.

  I came closer to the trunk of the tree and looked up into the knotty tangle of branches. It was hard to see; I saw just the heel of a boot at first, then, using the beam of my phone, I saw her heart-shaped face and cotton-wool glow of hair. I could see that there was a kind of novelty in my arrival: she hadn’t been expecting me.

  ‘D’you know, what I really fancy,’ I said, ‘is a Dutch breakfast. Wouldn’t that be so perfect, right about now?’

  This was a smart calculation: Bel liked few things more than breakfast.

  ‘Heartless, patronising bitch,’ said Bel.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Azia. Sanctimonious, lecturing, officious … cheap.’

  Oh: that was it. Azia had refused to pay for something. Bel was a genius at getting people to pay for things. No doubt she’d demanded something – caviar and blinis, a second bottle of champagne – that Azia had been unwilling to fund.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.

  There was no reply.

  Cautiously, I put my hand up to the nearest low-hanging branch, trying to work out which route Bel had taken up the tree. But I’m a swimmer, not a climber; it didn’t look easy. Finally I found something I thought I could use as a foothold.

  ‘Nora,’ said Darian. ‘You don’t have to …’

  ‘I think I’d better,’ I said. Noble Nora.

  ‘Jesus, you’re braver than I am. Here.’

  He had an iPhone; it lit the way better than my Nokia. The low-hanging branch was up and to my right; I grabbed hold of it with both arms, and swung my legs up higher to a higher-up nub. Then I reached out for another branch, missed it, swayed and reached up again.

  ‘Careful,’ said Darian.

  I had made it now to the first fork, and I felt safer in the cradle of branches. I took out the phone once more.

  ‘Bel, darling,’ I said. ‘Are you going to make a girl come all the way up there? I do hate to mess up my hair.’

  My American accent was improving, though it wasn’t as good as hers.

  The hiccuppy sob morphed briefly into a damp chuckle.

  ‘Dutch breakfast,’ I resumed. ‘Ham, boiled eggs, croissants, Emmental …’

  ‘Gouda,’ came the voice from above. I knew that she wouldn’t be able to resist correcting me. And I suspected that she wouldn’t be able to resist the thought of a Dutch breakfast, which had been a pet obsession of hers since one of her artist friends had returned from Rotterdam.

  ‘We can go home past the twenty-four-hour Tesco,’ I said soothingly.

  As I spoke, I scaled another rung of the tree. My size, I realised, was actually more help than hindrance, but I had no instinct for what I was doing and had to rely on logic alone. The problem was that I’d have to go all the way up to get her. She was very unlikely to meet me halfway. I found that my eyes were adjusting a little to the leafy dark. The branches sprang out like spokes from the spine of the tree; the leaves had a sharp tang that must have been chlorophyll.

  Whatever the crisis had been, it was over by the time I got to where Bel was nesting. She’d stayed up only to prolong the drama. She’d stayed up because Darian had not been able to fetch her. She was, I saw, looking at something on her phone, and seemed almost comfortable. There was a strong smell of alcohol. Darian was right: if she’d passed out and fallen, it wouldn’t have been pleasant.

  ‘Breakfast in bed,’ I said. ‘And maybe a story. How would that be? Would you like that? Here. Give me your hand. Got everything?’

  I watched her thinking about her choices. Was the scene over, or just beginning?

  ‘Everyone’sh against me,’ she said. ‘They think I can’t be trusted. Bastards, the lot of ’em. Darian too.
’

  ‘Of course you can be trusted,’ I said.

  ‘If that’s true, then how-comesh he can’t just leave me up here in peace. Huh?’

  ‘You matter to him,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t want you to fall.’

  ‘I am safe as houses in thish tree,’ she said, shaking her curls. ‘I am a Child of Trees. I know them, and they know me.’ Then a strange expression masked her features, as though a new thought had occurred to her. ‘How-comesh he called you?’ she said.

  I pointed out that there weren’t many other people available to call. But she was looking at me with deep suspicion, as Oscar might once have done.

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘He called you. In the middle of the night. Are you having an affair with my brother?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Definitely not. I mean, he’s a lovely person. But no. I promise. There’s nothing going on between us.’

  ‘I’ve seen the way you look at each other.’

  I hissed a helpless, exasperated sigh. ‘Bel … we don’t …’

  And even if we did, I found myself thinking, would it matter? But this – the tree, the fight-over-nothing with Azia, everything – was Bel’s universe, where she decided what was real and where she decided what was true, and what was right and wrong.

  ‘Good. You’d better not be lying, Nora. Because he’s not the Art Man. He’sh my brother.’

  For a long time, I was quite silent and still. Various options turned in my head like machinery. I could climb down leaving her to her own devices. I could take umbrage at her accusation, openly. But I did neither of those things. Inside, though, an old cold feeling reached for my heart with an ice-glove hand. She was Bel, and she was my friend. That was true. But at that moment, she reminded me very much of Old Evie in her drinking days. Irrational, furious, unpredictable, terrifying. And I did not like the way she spoke to me.

  After five minutes or so, very neutrally, I suggested again that we should go down to the ground. I reminded her of the breakfast that we could make, and how pleased the cat would be to see her.

  ‘OK, honey,’ she said.