The Lies You Told

by Harriet Tyce

  After a few minutes looking on the internet at cardboard shields and masks, I turn off the phone. I’ll do something with a bed sheet, and it will have to do. I get back to work with a sigh, suppressing the thought that sheets have more to do with togas and Romans than Greek myths.

  Robin isn’t happy the next morning with my bodged effort.

  “I look really stupid,” she says. “Everyone is going to laugh.”

  “They’re not going to laugh. You’ll all be wearing the same sort of thing.”

  “Bet we’re not,” she says, but she stops moaning.

  I stand back and admire my work. A sheet draped in a classical way, pinned together at the shoulder, a wreath made out of some scraps of green material I found in a drawer. And the pièce de résistance, a stuffed owl that was living in a glass case in the hall, which Robin is now holding, though without any great enthusiasm.

  “What happens if I drop it?” Robin says. “Or lose it? Or something bad happens to it?”

  “Nothing bad is going to happen to it. Take it into the assembly, put it in your desk for safekeeping, then we’ll bring it home at the end of the day.”

  “I don’t want to,” Robin says.

  “If you don’t have it, how will anyone know you’re meant to be Athena, goddess of war? Goddess of wisdom? Not born a baby, but springing fully armed from her father Zeus’s skull.”

  Robin looks blank. “If she’s the goddess of war, shouldn’t I have a sword or something?”

  “We don’t have any swords. We’ve got an owl. The sign of wisdom. It will have to do.”

  “You carry it to school then,” Robin says. She zips her anorak up over the top of the sheet. The classical effect is spoiled, somewhat. But then they probably wouldn’t have used floral sheets for their clothes, either, I think, ramming the owl into a plastic bag. Robin rolls her eyes and marches ahead of me toward the bus stop.

  I say goodbye to Robin at the end of the road and watch her scurry away, head down, sheet beginning to trail on the ground. Once she’s through the gates, I head toward the tube. Just as I’m about to go into the station I realize that I’m still carrying the damn owl. I know Robin would prefer not to have it, but that’s not the point. Without it, she really is just draped in bedclothes—I turn on my heel and march back to school. When I get to the gates, I run into Nicole.

  “Hi,” Nicole says, with every air of being delighted to see me, her voice warm. “All set for assembly?”

  “All set. Thanks for the heads up.”

  “Oh, any time. I do think sometimes that the form reps could be more on it, you know, with reminders, that kind of thing. If I were doing it…”

  I try to keep my smile pinned to my mouth, but I can feel it slipping.

  “I have to get this in to Robin,” I say, waving the bag at Nicole.

  “Aren’t you coming in anyway?” Nicole says, her voice lifting at the end of her sentence with a note of surprise.

  “I’ve got work. Are we supposed to come?”

  “Of course we are,” Nicole says, and takes me by the arm, drawing me through the gates into the school building before I can argue further.

  It’s the first time I’ve been properly inside the building for nearly thirty years. I brace myself, expecting a deluge of memories to drag me down, but it looks completely different, paintwork and flooring updated and clean. It always used to smell of pine disinfectant, but this has faded, too, a sweet, citrus scent there in its place. It’s only when we get to the entrance to the hall that I recognize with a jolt a feature from the past, the wooden shields above the doors, filled in with the names of all the school captains and vice captains in gold lettering.

  I pull away from Nicole’s grasp and walk along, reading the dates at the top of the shields, searching for one in particular. It takes a minute until I find it, so many years have passed since I left, so many girls’ names memorialized in this way. But there I am, Sadie Roper, Captain. I remember my mother sneering at it—It’s hardly Head Boy at Eton, is it? Feeble that they do this for a load of eleven-year-olds—how it pricked the bubble of my pride, shriveled it with shame. I couldn’t look at it after that, the pleasure I had in it tainted, like a stain.

  Seeing it now I feel a twinge of that same shame before I push it away from me, imagining instead how pleased Robin will be when I show her. She won’t think it’s ridiculous.

  “Aren’t you coming in?” Nicole says, and I turn around, registering her presence again.

  “Yes. I was just…” but she’s gone ahead into the hall before I can finish my sentence.

  I can tell the owl is a mistake from the moment I hand it over to a teacher to give to Robin.

  “Is this real?” the woman says, holding it out at arm’s length.

  “Yes.”

  “A dead owl?”

  “Yes. It’s stuffed. Taxidermy.”

  “I’m a vegan,” she says.

  “I’m not asking you to eat it,” I say, trying not to sound exasperated.

  “What’s it for, exactly?” the teacher asks.

  “It’s for my daughter Robin’s costume. She just needs to hold it, and then she’ll look the part—the goddess of wisdom.”

  “Right,” the woman says, taking the owl from me with an expression of revulsion, holding it as gingerly as she can.

  It doesn’t get better when the girls come out on stage in front of the school in the assembly hall. Even from the back of the hall, I can see that there’s a space around Robin, and that the girls are twitchy, not paying full attention to their performance. They are telling the story of Perseus and how he overcame Medusa, and the child playing the part of Medusa is in the best dress-up outfit of the morning, her skin all painted green and her head wreathed in a nest of multicolored snakes. All the girls are beautifully turned out, in fact, Bacchus with vines, Aphrodite with a golden apple, lots of nymphs in proper dresses. No one is wearing a sheet apart from Robin, and she looks very bedraggled by now. As does the owl, loose feathers following Robin around the stage.

  Nor is Robin as fluent as the other girls whenever she has a line to speak, and I have to strain to hear her. I try not to let my paranoia run away with me, but I’m starting to get a distinct feeling that something is happening up on the stage to put her off. I ignore the feeling, try to rationalize it, but when it comes to the final section, I can’t pretend it’s not real any more. Robin is definitely being got at. She comes to the front of the stage, her mouth open as if for a declamation, when someone at the far left corner of the stage yells, “She’s holding a dead bird. It stinks.”

  I clutch the sides of my chair as I watch the disaster play out as if in slow motion. There’s a buzzing around me as the other parents start to notice, too. Robin’s face turns red, redder than I’ve seen it since she was a baby. She starts to speak but hesitates, stops, holding up the owl in front of her as if in surprise, as if to ask: How did this owl end up with me? And then her mouth crumples, followed by the rest of her expression, and she looks at the owl one more time, her growing humiliation clear on her face, before she chucks it away from her, throwing it along the stage, straight into a group of nymphs and goddesses, and she turns, and she runs. But she can’t even run because of the sheet, the shitty, shitty floral sheet. It falls down around her feet and trips her up, and between the cloud of feathers and screams in the audience and the sight of Robin, sprawling, before clambering to her feet and running off stage in her undershirt and sports shorts, I don’t know where to look.

  Before I can get up and go and retrieve Robin from the mess, someone pushes past me. It’s Julia. She’s sprinting up through the assembly hall, yelling and shoving her way past the teachers who have materialized on the stage.

  “Daisy has allergies,” Nicole says, her voice grave. “She’s really allergic to feathers. This could be really serious. Julia’s going to go spare.”

  “Where is Daisy?” I hope beyond hope that she’s been on the periphery of the action, backstage even.r />
  Nicole raises her hand and points, straight into the heart of the commotion. I peer at the stage. It’s hard to make out which child is which from a distance. But as I squint, I start to distinguish one from the other. I can see which girl was hit by the owl, bits of his desiccated corpse all over her head and body. It’s Medusa, her snakes broken and her green makeup smeared. And as Julia launches herself at this child, alternately picking bits of bird off her and hugging her, it becomes very apparent that Medusa is Daisy. A stone lodges itself in the pit of my stomach.

  I steel myself and approach the stage, hoping to find Robin and take her away. She’s hovering in the far corner, tears streaming down her face, no one paying any attention to her as they throng around Daisy. I’m nearly at Robin’s side when Julia starts to scream.

  “You! Hey, you there!” Julia says at the top of her voice. “New girl. Sadie.”

  I try to put a Who, me? expression on my face, but it’s not even fooling me. I turn slowly to face Julia.

  “Your stupid little scheme has nearly killed my daughter,” Julia says. “Look at the state of her.”

  I look. It’s not great. Daisy is a complete mess. She doesn’t look close to death, though.

  “I don’t think there’s any need to blow this out of proportion,” I say. “Obviously we’re both really sorry that this happened, but there’s no question that anyone has nearly been killed.”

  “How dare you make light of this situation? She has serious asthma and an allergy to birds—there could be a delayed reaction. And if that, that thing had hit her at a different angle it could have had her eye out. I know you’ve done this on purpose, trying to hurt Daisy like this. Your sad little daughter is so pathetic. She’s jealous. She’s trying to undermine Daisy any way she can.”

  I nearly shout back at her to tell her to stop being so ridiculous. But I have just enough self-control to stop myself, looking at the state of Robin, her shoulders drooping, her face tear-stained, utterly bedraggled. I go to her and put my arm around her shoulders, but she stands stiff as a board, tremors running through her body.

  “I consider this to be a deliberate act of sabotage,” Julia says. She’s standing right in front of me, veins throbbing in her neck, the tendons so tight they look like they’re about to snap. “It’s Friday, they’ve got their practice test today—you both know that. This is nothing but an attempt to distress Daisy, make sure she’s not at peak performance. If it falls apart, I’m going to sue.”

  With that, she grabs hold of Daisy’s arm and pulls her away. I try to hug Robin, but she pulls away, too.

  “What tests?” I ask Robin.

  “Practice tests for the entrance exams next term,” Robin says. “They all care way too much.”

  “You haven’t talked about the practice tests.”

  “They’re not important, that’s why.”

  “Robin…” I start to say, but she turns and marches away. I’ve no option but to follow.

  15

  The rest passes in a blur. Robin and I leave the stage and we’re swept up by Nicole, who makes soothing noises and gets Robin a skirt and jumper from Lost Property to replace the fallen sheet. The headmistress looks at us both with a very serious expression before asking me if I’ll come in at the end of the afternoon to discuss it. I nod. It’s not like I can argue. Robin disappears out of the hall, and seeing Julia approaching me, I do the same. I walk fast, out of the front door and through the gates. But as soon as I turn the corner out of sight of school, I break into a sprint.

  David Phelps is at the reception desk when I eventually get to chambers, but I’m too worked up to speak to him. I smile, the corners of my mouth barely lifting, and walk straight through and up the stairs into Barbara’s room, where I throw myself into work, reading through pages and pages of messages.

  By lunchtime, I’ve started to build up a clear picture of the complainant. She’s sharp-tongued, arrogant, and quick to take offense. Lots of social media contacts. Perhaps not so many friends. There’s an edge to her exchanges, a real fuck you attitude. I’m starting to like her. She’s funny. She’s also a liar, I remind myself, according to the instructions I’ve been given. At least there’s no trace of communication with the accused. So far, so good.

  I make my report to Barbara, who has been in court unexpectedly on another matter this morning.

  “Good, that’s what we like to hear,” she says in response. “I’m certain there’s nothing to be found, either, but it’ll be good to have it confirmed. Anyway, wrap it up for now. The client will be here in a few minutes.”

  I go through to the loo and tidy up my face, brush my hair. Under the harsh strip lighting I can see that my jacket and skirt are covered with lots of tiny bits of feather, gray against the dark wool of the suit, and I brush my hand over them, trying to get them off, but after only a couple of minutes, Barbara sticks her head around the bathroom door and tells me to get a move on. At least the worst of it is off.

  “Through here,” Barbara says, gesturing me into the conference room. It’s furnished with an oval table and several chairs. There’s a sideboard laden with a coffee machine, water, and two large platters of sandwiches.

  “How many people are coming?” I ask.

  “Jeremy, his solicitor, Zora. I think you know her? And his mother,” Barbara says.

  I nod. “His mother?”

  “His parents are being very supportive,” Barbara says. Her tone is dry. “Almost competitively so.”

  I raise an eyebrow. There’s a story in that dryness.

  Barbara opens her mouth, about to speak, but she’s interrupted by a phone call.

  “Send them up,” Barbara says down the line. “We’re all set.”

  She turns to me. “Yes. The poor man, his parents don’t speak to each other. There was a very bitter divorce some years ago. Father’s paying for the fees, mother’s the shoulder to cry on.”

  “That sounds complicated.”

  “All somewhat infantilizing. The client’s perfectly pleasant, but rather wet. It’s not entirely surprising,” Barbara says. “Jeremy is their only child. They absolutely dote on him. This is putting them all through hell. As they tell me. Repeatedly. They will be keeping a close eye on how the defense is run.”

  I blink again. “Oh, lord.”

  “Quite,” Barbara says.

  There’s a noise outside the door, and Kirsten walks in, the clients behind her. A woman in her late middle age comes in first behind Kirsten, then Zora, tidy in a black trouser suit, and bringing up the rear, a young man who must be Jeremy. The older woman is assured, almost arrogant in her movements, taking a seat immediately at the head of the table. She’s dressed very smartly, dark trousers and a jacket, a silk scarf knotted at her throat. Jeremy hesitates at the door, a little stooped, his demeanor apologetic, his jacket tweed.

  He looks even younger than I expected.

  Barbara welcomes Zora and Jeremy in and gestures to places at the table. Kirsten makes coffee and puts out the sandwiches. When she’s left the room, Barbara begins.

  “Jeremy, it’s good to see you. Alexandra, you too. Thank you for coming in. I want to introduce you to Sadie. Sadie Roper, Alexandra Taylor, Jeremy Taylor.” Barbara nods to them both in turn. “Sadie is my new junior on the case. She’s just rejoined chambers after some time away.”

  “Some time away, eh? Hope you’ve kept your hand in,” Alexandra says, her voice cold. She glares at me.

  I reach across the table to shake hands, smiling, trying not to react. Jeremy’s clasp is comfortable; warm, but not too hot. A reassuring handshake—not what I expected. Alexandra’s hand lies limp and heavy in mine.

  “Of course,” Barbara says. “She’s good. She gets it. And she looks the part. We need an all-female team, make sure he seems sympathetic. Yes?”

  As if with reluctance, Alexandra’s glare slowly transforms into an expression that’s more measured, less hostile.

  “Good point,” she says. “You make a good po
int. I approve. Well done, Zora.”

  Zora smiles at me, winks. “Welcome aboard, Sadie.”

  As the conference continues, I sit back and take stock of the room. Barbara isn’t asking questions of the client, at least not yet, but rather giving him an outline of where they are up to in the preparation of his case. They have obtained character witnesses from some highly illustrious personages, his father’s connections shining through. There’s even a bishop in there, and the chaplain from the school he attended, extolling his virtues.

  It all sounds far too good to be true. I’m trying not to feel too cynical about it. Naturally he would be able to drum up all this support—he’s establishment through and through. All the right places of education, the badges of privilege lined up in order.

  He doesn’t come over badly, though, something guileless in the openness of his gaze. His brown hair is slicked back from his face but a lock of fringe keeps flopping down and he pushes it back, the movement automatic. It’s hard to believe he’s a fully qualified teacher—he looks like a student. He could even pass for a sixth former if the lights were low. It’s not unappealing.

  Once she’s finished enumerating the references, Barbara turns to Jeremy.

  “You’re definitely going to be happy about giving evidence?” she says. “It’ll be a very difficult environment.”

  I watch him carefully. His mouth is fixed but there’s a wobble in his chin. He coughs, clears his throat.

  “All I wanted to do was help,” he says. “I had no idea it would come to this. Do you really think I’ll need to take the stand?”

  His voice is gentle, in keeping with the rest of him. My resistance to him is waning, even though I’d rather suss him out for a bit longer. He sounds very forlorn. It starts to seem plausible that he’s more hapless than predatory.

  “I think it’s definitely going to be necessary,” Barbara says, “if we can’t get the case thrown out at half-time.”

  “Of course it’ll be thrown out at half-time. There’s no bloody evidence for this whatsoever,” Alexandra interrupts.