At the first gate, beneath the Byward Tower, Tristan knocked on the door, rousing a furious Beefeater. I remember only a huge brass plate: ‘Yeoman’s Gaoler’, and his quantity of keys. Tristan gave an exaggerated salute. Then we bent beneath the slender rectangle of door in a massive gate, our line expanded to include the Yeoman of the Guard. I was marched over the stone bridge to Middle Tower. No word passed between us, Tristan standing to attention as the keys were inserted in the final lock and the handle turned. It was only when at last I struggled through the second cutout door onto Lower Thames Street that I heard him murmur to the Beefeater:
‘I found her with one of the men.’
Lie 52: I’m Sylvie
I volunteered with the Samaritans. I had known despair.
The Enfield, Haringey and Barnet branch knew despair too, and was manned by a humane collection of those who had met misery and knew its colours. One of the volunteers wore only purple, in cascading shades.
I was twenty-one, and manned the phone on regular evenings and weekends, with a commitment of one full night a month, 10 p.m. until 7 a.m.
The branch was based in a Victorian semi, round the corner from Bounds Green tube. In the bay-windowed front room there were three telephones in booths, a scraggy nondescript blue carpet worn threadbare beneath three cheap office chairs. At each desk sat a curly corded phone, with pull dial, and a big handset that could be jammed comfortably between shoulder and ear. The chairs were on wheels so that we rolled between the desks for biscuits, exchanging cryptic notes: ‘TEA! TWO SUGARS’ or ‘ANOTHER BRENDA?’
Before my time, a volunteer was able to ask those who wanted to masturbate if they would prefer to avail themselves of a service. The code question was: ‘Would you like to speak to Brenda?’ However, Brenda had thrown in the towel by the late eighties and we were left to fend for ourselves. I did not fend well. Evenings and weekends obscene phone calls were almost all I got. I was young and female, and callers would hang up on the men and older women so as to do it with me.
We were only allowed to terminate calls if we were sure they were ‘abusive’, and we were encouraged to ask every caller: ‘Are you feeling suicidal?’ I would try to ruin their orgasm with the suicide question, whilst they attempted the soundless come.
Although the overnight stints were exhausting, during those hours, between ten and seven, the wankers fell off and despair began calling. As night dragged towards dawn their loneliness swelled. A widower lost in his empty bed, the single mother up for eviction, pensioners facing Christmas, the teenager too scared to go home.
By four, when the night was at its coldest, my teeth ground hollowly, the bitter taste of emptiness in my mouth. I was often so tired it sickened me, dozing to the second volunteer’s soft ‘mmms’ and ‘yeahs’ as she listened through the small hours to a mind turn endless circles. It was in this late part of the night that Sylvie rang.
I picked up the handset, blundering over to a booth.
‘This is Miranda.’
A terrified voice whispered:
‘I’m Sylvie.’
‘Is everything okay?’ There was silence. ‘Sylvie? Are you okay?’
‘He’s coming,’ she said. ‘Can you hear?’
And I could, the regular thump of a shoulder thrown against the door. As the wood was pounded into its frame, we murmured to one another, crouched against what would happen when her lover broke in. He was coming, she repeated, and I lied to reassure her, as sure as she that he was.
The lover stopped hurling himself at the door and took to shouting through the letterbox. Then he disappeared to rouse his mother for the key. In the long quiet that followed she told me the sorry things that had happened on previous nights. We whispered together, terrified, her hauling me through scene after scene, in bedrooms, in cupboards, beneath stairs, until a grey light crept round the cheap cotton curtains, and the birds of Bounds Green woke.
He was coming, she said again. She heard his tread on the stairs.
And soon he was, his breath ragged, his cackle as sick as the Joker’s, her desperate voice disappeared.
A long, frightening silence followed and then, like the harsh dring of a call in the night, she snickered into the phone extension, her scorn deteriorating with measured slowness.
Sylvie laughed at me. And laughed.
Afterwards, on the street outside, not yet able to face the tube or the day, I stood and stood on the pavement in the queasy orange light.
Lie 53: I want a relationship
Henry, my counsellor, was in his sixties. He counselled out of a room in Finsbury Park. I remember the chairs, the carpet and the walls being entirely brown. I had come because a fellow volunteer at the Samaritans had taken me aside and offered to pay. Not seeing what a shambles I was in, I reasoned that the only problem I had was men. They were all bastards.
When Henry asked me what I wanted to get out of our sessions I replied:
‘A relationship.’
‘Presumably a long-term relationship?’
I nodded, tearful.
‘Are you in one at the moment?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me about him.’
Rich was a nineteen-year-old mental health nurse at a North London psychiatric hospital, with a sister and mother who disapproved of me.
‘And how old are you?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘So how long do you estimate this relationship will last then?’
‘A year.’
‘Because your relationships usually last that long?’
‘No, not really. Some have, but never in a single sitting.’
‘Okay, but you think this one will last a year.’
‘I want it to.’
‘Well, a year seems pretty optimistic to me. At his age, I don’t imagine you’ll get past the summer.’
Appalled, I stared out the netted window to the street. Neither of us spoke for some time.
As it happens Rich and I lasted barely another fortnight. One of the reasons might have been that I had not been entirely honest. Rich wasn’t my only relationship. I didn’t mention the estate agent I’d been at school with, or the Irish hairdresser with a heroin habit.
I didn’t mention them because they didn’t count. Frankly I’d probably forgotten them myself. When Henry asked, the nineteen-year-old militant vegetarian working the wards of North London was the only man I wanted.
Yet Henry had hit a nerve with his quip about the summer. I was not two-timing Rich out of greed, but because I was hedging. To minimise the opportunity for rejection I had spread myself thin and wide. I no longer had to worry about trusting anyone else, because they sure as hell could not trust me.
Perhaps it was also about not being able to end a relationship. The guilt ate me up. It was easier to get caught out for philandering than confess I had moved on.
I use the term relationship loosely. Every man I went to bed with I wanted a relationship from. The hairdresser and I had been trying to pull off something long-term for two years, but smack was an obstacle too difficult to scale. He and I couldn’t even talk about it. He’d told me the aluminium foil lying around in his bedroom was for dyeing his clients’ hair. But I couldn’t give him up. I’d developed a habit too – for the way I laughed in his company. Whole mornings would pass when I did little else.
Although I told Henry about the hairdresser’s heroin addiction, the detail I kept to myself. Instead I started writing him unsent letters outlining that I never wanted to come into his brown room again. Face to face I tried to fob him off with news of the estate agent, but Henry wasn’t easily fobbed. He wanted me to take the gear seriously.
‘I’m sure he’s only smoking it,’ I said when an AIDS test was mooted.
If anyone asked why my relationship with the hairdresser ended, I always blamed smack. It still remains a convenient excuse. More problematic, the diary reveals, was my dishonesty. That was why the hairdresser pulled away. He had found evidence of another ma
n – ‘the pair of biking boots in the hall and on the underside of the loo seat, one sodden black pube’.
In my diaries I find I have been loyal to no one. And though I blame men for not ringing, for not wanting a relationship, it is me who cancels dates at the last minute, or tries to squeeze two into one afternoon. The worst of it is my behaviour comes to me as some fresh revelation. It is excruciating to realise, in the light of my unwillingness to forgive my father, that I was so faithless myself.
By session eight with Henry I had grown to loathe his grouchy truth-telling. He had sniffed my dishonesty and gave me a task that he hoped would expose the root of my lies.
Henry asked me to write an honest letter to my parents. I’ve kept many of my unsent letters, often to boyfriends, but that letter is nowhere to be found. I remember the struggle to write it, how meagre it looked on the page, how much I’d still not been able to say, and Henry’s unenthusiastic response.
‘Do you think you’re protecting them,’ he asked, ‘by not writing down the feelings we’ve discussed together?’
When I wouldn’t or couldn’t answer he would always leave an uncomfortable few minutes’ silence for reflection before picking up his monologue again.
‘What do you think would happen if your parents were to hear how you feel?’
I shrugged.
‘Do you think they’re going to be racked by guilt? Be sorry? Be too fragile to take it? Or do you actually suspect they’re not going to react at all?’
I gritted my teeth.
‘You may pretend that you’re protecting them, but I think the only person you’re trying to save here is yourself.’
Lie 54: I just wanted to return his pullover
I had been single since Sunday and it was already Good Friday, my ex’s boots still planted beneath the bed. In Time Out there was a three-starred gig listed at the Monarch. I preferred to drink elsewhere, but I thought I should find more original reasons to go into Camden other than getting laid. I had just finished my last session with Henry, where we had gone over again (as we did each week) the necessity for honesty in a relationship, and keeping my knickers on. Therefore my tentative resolve that evening was to remain sober and fully clothed.
As soon as I got inside the pub I saw him. He was sitting at one of the large tables near the door, still almost a boy. I remember nothing of what he wore – perhaps it was the purple T-shirt or the cropped ex-DDR coat that I can recall from other memories. He had brown eyes in a clear face.
I went over to the bar, as was my habit, and ordered a pint. The pub was crowded, the corner given over to a tiny stage. A couple of musicians were arsing about with their equipment. After a while they started to play.
Soon a Goth with blotchy eyeliner got chatting. Perhaps he offered to buy me a drink. I never accepted drinks. Sean had taught me that accepting drinks was falling into debt. And for that kind of debt the bailiff always called.
I humoured the Goth, my eyes shifting to the table and the boy. He dutifully paid attention to the band, a half of Guinness sitting in front of him, barely drunk. Occasionally he leant over the table and nodded at the person opposite. A man.
The music gave the Goth the excuse to lean in close and shout, his beer sloshing between us as he emphasised each of his points. The first act wound up to desultory applause. Five minutes passed, all of us more interested in the empty stage than we had been when it was filled. Still the headline band did not appear; my mind worked through possible pick-up strategies.
‘There’s someone bothering me at the bar,’ was what I said when I went over. ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’
The boy with the cheekbones smiled, his friend shuffling along the bench. The friend introduced himself as Arnaud, and the boy as Matthias. Where were they from? I asked.
‘France,’ said Arnaud, indicating himself. ‘And Germany.’
Germany? I’d laid a heroin addict, a bedwetter and an alcoholic, but a German? There was also a hostile, self-assured quality about the friend, as if he knew the world and was tired of it already.
Matthias, my target, said nothing.
I watched the empty stage, wondering how to extricate myself. As I prevaricated, we were forced to listen to a good deal of Arnaud’s complaints about England. Matthias said little, his face set in an unflinching smile.
Arnaud disappeared to a phone box, leaving his charge alone. I insisted on another Guinness, and plenty of cigarettes. I probably also plied him with one of my rehearsed monologues – perhaps the one which involved a sadomasochistic neighbour who enjoyed hooking up her boyfriend to the car battery. Before a man took advantage of me I always liked to test his courage.
The boy continued to smile.
Arnaud returned. He was flustered. There was a great deal more fretting, this time over a toothbrush. Arrangements he had made to stay with someone’s mother had broken down. With each word their worlds and mine strayed farther and farther apart.
But despite his references to mothers and toothbrushes, perhaps I offered to let them sleep on my futon. They were children. Over-educated children, one doing a PhD at Cambridge, the other a non-specific postgraduate humanities degree.
Still exercised about the toothbrush and the absent band, Arnaud ordered us out of the Monarch and on to Bar Gansa on Inverness Street with its red awning and greying goose. It was on the way, sobering to the North London night, that I finally admitted that I was a secretary. Which led, over coffee, to Arnaud and I having a fight about Sartre. I said goodnight.
Reaching the top of the escalator in Camden Town I remarked to myself that I had maintained my resolve. It was the first time in a long while that I had arrived in Camden and left it both sober and alone.
The exhilaration lasted only as far as Archway, when I began to regret having no way of getting in touch. But the boy was German, I repeated. Asking for a number would have looked desperate. What I needed was a long-term relationship and this definitely was not it.
Yes, I threw myself in front of the television, it was a relief. He was German, and small. I’d always seen myself with someone bigger. Christ, he was a scientist too. I lit another cigarette. There was nothing redemptive about any of it. He lived in Cambridge. The countryside.
When I check my diary for movements over that Easter weekend, I find that Henry’s counselling had not had the conclusive effect I have pretended to myself. The relationship break-up was not going as cleanly as I would have liked, and to console myself I had hooked up with another ex.
Mess and sex aside, by the Tuesday I had made a decision.
I rang up Directory Enquiries from work and asked for the number of the University of Cambridge. The French sidekick had mentioned the Zoology Department.
‘Good morning,’ said the receptionist.
‘Morning. I wonder if you could give me the address for one of your PhD students. He left his jumper in the pub on Friday, and I wanted to post it back.’
It was Gillian, my colleague, who suggested the jumper. A perfect lie. A jumper was just the sort of object Cambridge University students might realistically leave behind them – or did ‘pullover’, I wondered, seem more authentic?
‘His name?’
‘Matthias Landgraf?’
‘How are you spelling that?’
‘I’m not sure.’ I heard her riffling through the pages of the directory.
‘Like I say, I just wanted to return his pullover …’
‘Landgraf, did you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just putting you through.’
In the bowels of the Zoology Department a phone rang and rang and rang. Eventually a woman picked up.
‘Hello?’
She sounded right in the middle of something very important.
‘Can I speak to Matthias Landgraf please,’ I managed to ask.
‘Matthias? I’ll just get him.’
There were rushed footsteps and a fire door banged. It was only when I heard someone coming back through it t
hat, heart hammering, I hung up. Gillian hissed from her desk beside me.
‘And?’
‘I hung up.’
‘Did you get his address?’
‘No.’
‘So what are you going to do now?’
Gillian, pushing forty, still lived at home with her parents. This fact I repeated to myself so as to get up the courage to ring the receptionist back.
The second time I asked simply for the Zoology Department’s address. But then I couldn’t resist lying again in my letter to Matthias. I wrote saying that I would be visiting Cambridge to meet a friend (though I knew no one between Mill Hill and the Scottish borders). Could he do tea?
I arrived at Cambridge station to find he was late, jogging up the street towards me, wearing, this time, I’m fairly positive, his purple T-shirt.
I often say to myself and to others that Henry was the significant factor in my falling in love with him, which overlooks an obvious truth. That Matthias is a man worth falling in love with.
What he remembers is the ducks on the Mill Pond. Although I have only the vaguest memory of ducks, my diary entry speaks of them too. It is the moment he recognised that I might be what he was waiting for. I am less tender, moaning on in my diary, and to anyone who was prepared to listen, that despite the fact I was carrying a spare pair of knickers and a toothbrush, he put me on the last train home.
Lie 55: Honestly it won’t be so bad
White lies do not injure anyone, are morally neutral and, many would say, trivial. We could argue then that the pullover lie is a white one. Pullovers don’t injure anyone and they have no effect on our morals. In fact without the pullover Matthias would have ended up with another scientist (he never got out much) and then killed her career. Reproduction is a straightforward way that male academics can take out the competition. So it’s not just a white lie but a very good one. However others would say the pullover is neither white nor grey, nor even good. It’s merely gratuitous.
A Book of Untruths Page 14