Little Liar

by Lisa Ballantyne

  ‘And you have two young children?’

  Nick cleared his throat. ‘Yeah, Luca’s six and Ava’s four.’

  The conversation’s turn to family chat unnerved him further. His palms were suddenly slick with sweat.

  ‘Young kids. It can be hard on a marriage. Do you find your sex life has changed?’

  Nick sat back in his seat. ‘I think that’s my business.’

  ‘Would you consider yourself as a man of average or greater than average sexual habits?’

  ‘Average.’ Nick glanced at Faldane, who was frowning, two fingers raised off the table, as if he was about to call a halt to proceedings.

  ‘Do you have any sexual interests that you think some people would find unusual?’

  ‘No.’ Heart thumping against his ribcage.

  Faldane punched the top of his pen. ‘Is that everything then? Can we call this a night?’

  Nick’s statement was read back to him by Weston and Nick signed it.

  Brookes stood up. ‘Sure – let’s get you bailed.’

  ‘Bail? What does that mean?’ Nick began.

  ‘We’re releasing you on police bail,’ said Brookes. ‘We need time to investigate as there is not enough evidence to charge you. As part of your bail conditions you can still live at home … that’s not always the case in these situations.’

  Nick frowned. He and Faldane followed Brookes down a corridor where a young police officer processed the bail.

  ‘The conditions of your bail are that you are to have no unsupervised contact with any under eighteens,’ Brookes continued. ‘Any breach of bail conditions and we will have to take you into custody.’

  Nick looked up, hands on his hips and an incredulous smile on his lips. ‘What does that mean? I have two children. You just said there wasn’t enough evidence to charge me.’

  ‘You must have no unsupervised contact with any under eighteens; that includes minors you may encounter through work as well as family members.’

  ‘Are you saying I can’t be alone with my own kids? Is that what you’re really saying?’ Anger consumed him for the first time.

  Brookes’ face hardened.

  ‘This is fucking unfair.’ Nick felt Faldane’s hand on his arm, tempering him.

  He and Faldane stepped out into the cool, still evening. Nick put two hands to his head as if surrendering and took a breath. He felt emptied out. Faldane lit a cigarette.

  ‘Do you need a ride?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Faldane’s car was an Audi convertible, somehow incongruous with its owner. There was a child’s booster seat in the back and when Nick got into the front he sat on a stuffed monkey.

  ‘Sorry, that’s my daughter’s,’ Faldane laughed, cigarette between his teeth while he buckled his seatbelt. ‘I’ll not tell her you sat on him.’

  Faldane started the car and Nick’s face fell into his hands. The lights of the police station faded as they headed down the dark road alongside Hankley Common. The radio was playing faintly.

  ‘What happens next?’ said Nick, turning to look at Bob, who was steering with one hand, his stomach pressing against the bottom of the wheel. He hoped his voice sounded calm, normal, instead of strung with the anxiety he felt in the pit of him.

  ‘Well, nothing very fast. These things usually take a while. I know it’s hard but you have to be patient.’ The window was open halfway and Bob blew smoke towards it, but the movement of the car meant it blew back in.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘At least until the bail date, perhaps longer. The best thing you can do is try to put it out of your mind and let the process do its work.’

  Nick opened the window and looked out at the darkness, feeling the breeze lift the hair from his forehead. ‘Just like that, eh?’ he said quietly, into the wind. ‘Just put it out of my mind.’

  It was midnight when he got home. He stood outside the front door for a moment, wondering what to say. He covered his face with the crook of his arm. He wanted to cry, or punch someone, break something, scream at the top of his voice. The front door opened and Marina was there, her face pinched with worry. He walked into her arms and held her close.

  6

  Donna

  Her most horrible imaginings had not included her daughter being molested, but Donna had learned early in life to expect the worst. Expectation was preparation.

  Waiting for Angela’s father to arrive, Donna moved quickly around the house, tidying magazines, and dusting the surfaces. She did it because she was nervous about his arrival, unsure what she was going to say, rather than concerned that he would criticise the cleanliness of the home he had left behind, although Stephen had always liked things neat. He would take his time on chores, undertaking tasks that Donna never even considered – such as vacuuming the stairs and wiping down skirting boards.

  Cleaning helped to calm her, taking her mind away from what had happened to Angela and how her father would react to the news. Sweat broke at her hairline as she polished the table in the lounge with big, muscular strokes. Angela’s confession, the hospital and then the police: Donna had taken each blow like a seasoned boxer. She had been so little when she learned the reflexes that now formed the basis of her nervous system. She reached up and swiped her duster at a cobweb, tendrils of memory turning in her mind.

  Donna was four years old and in her grandparents’ house. She was pinching the skin on the back of her grandmother’s hands – amazed that it stayed pinched and did not snap back onto her hand like her own skin. Her grandmother smiled at her with kind eyes as she held out her thin arm coursed with the deep worms of her veins. The coal fire was spitting and over the sound of the fire her grandfather coughed, hacking and wet, then lit another cigarette. The room and the furniture seemed huge, the ceiling high above her head and a single light bulb in the centre, competing with the light of the fire. Donna’s head reached just over the arm of her grandmother’s chair. The arms were covered in white lace that was ragged on the edges and yellow in the middle from elbows.

  Donna was hungry and so her grandmother made her a slice of bread with butter and jam. She ate it in the dark kitchen as her grandmother leaned down to watch. Gran’s eyes sparkled when she was happy.

  There was a big clock on the mantel that ticked loudly, and soon Donna realised that it was nearly six. She couldn’t tell the time properly, but she knew all the numbers and she knew half past, although she mixed up quarter to and quarter past. Six o’clock meant her mummy and daddy were coming to collect her. They had been at work and now it was time to go home.

  Just as the old clock began to chime, there was a knock and the back door opened. ‘Hello?’

  It was her parents.

  ‘Quick,’ her grandmother said, eyes sparkling, ‘it’s them. Hide.’

  It was the game.

  Every week it was the same. Donna would hide behind her grandfather’s big high-backed chair and pretend she wasn’t there. Her father and mother would walk into the room and then Donna would bounce out, making a noise like a tiger. Her father would put a hand to his chest in shock, and then pick her up and spin her around the room, so that she could almost touch the light in the middle of the ceiling.

  Donna crouched behind her grandmother’s chair. She could see nothing but the slow hungry licks of the fire, the tiled fireplace and the tools at the fireside for shovelling the coal and brushing out the grate. She put her arms around her knees to make herself as small as possible. She heard the living room door creak open and her father’s feet enter the room.

  ‘Raaaaaaaaa …’ Donna pounced out from behind the chair.

  Her father was covered in blood. He looked down at her with pinched, invisible eyes, then picked her up and put her on his knee. She was crying and choking and he kept saying that her mother would be fine, although Donna didn’t care about her mother then, she cared about him, didn’t want his face to be bleeding.

  She hugged him and the blood of her mother and father smeared on her
face and neck and arms.

  Donna stopped cleaning and looked at the clock. It was just before six. She went into the kitchen to wait and soon saw his car pull up in front of the house.

  Stephen was off duty, but anyone could tell he was police. He still wore the uniform trousers – black with a hard crease. His haircut stood to attention, as if shaped by the absent police cap, limbs stiff and impatient.

  Donna watched him step out of the car and tweak his slacks into alignment, then smooth the right side of his hair. He was driven to authority, never happier than when he was in charge. The will to power. She supposed it gave him a sense of importance, even after everything that had happened.

  He wouldn’t talk about it, but even Stephen had fallen from grace.

  Not long after they were married, it had happened. Stephen had been part of the riot squad detached to Upton Park after clashes between West Ham and Chelsea supporters. A sixteen-year-old boy, called Terrence Noaks, had stood watching as a West Ham supporter smashed up a car outside The Boleyn Arms. Stephen had pounced on Noaks, assuming that he too was a rioter and participant, fractured the boy’s skull in two places and broke his nose. The boy survived but remained permanently disfigured and suffered from epileptic fits and seizures.

  There had been threats of a court case and an inquiry but the boy had not been able to find a suitable lawyer to take on the Metropolitan Police. Instead, there had been an Independent Police Complaints Commission hearing. The attack had been described by the Metropolitan Police’s lawyer as an accidental collision. Stephen had been legally exonerated but demoted to a basic beat constable with no chance of further promotion or transfer.

  There was a small mirror on the kitchen wall and Donna glanced at herself and smoothed her hair before she opened the door.

  She had never been sure if her marriage had fallen apart because of her, or because of that hearing. Stephen lived for his job. He was a police officer before he was a man.

  Things were amicable between her and Stephen now, but she was anxious about telling him the news about Angela. She rubbed her hands together as if to gather energy before she opened the door, a wide smile on her lips.

  ‘Hello, thanks for coming early,’ she said, dipping her head in welcome and pulling her cardigan across her body. She was wearing thick socks in place of slippers and she looked down at them as she stepped back to allow him to enter.

  Once inside, he smoothed a hand through his metallic-coloured hair that behaved like steel wool. Stephen sat down in the living room.

  ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘Sure. Is she here?’

  ‘Yeah. She’s in her room, but I wanted to have a quick word with you first.’

  She warmed her hands with the cup as she sat opposite him and muted the television.

  ‘Is it strong enough?’

  ‘It’s great, thanks,’ he said, leaning forward to take a sip.

  The nights of screaming arguments were behind them. It was Donna who had done the screaming; Stephen’s voice always lowered in anger and so their rows had been underscored by his hissed condescension. Hurtful words had always been whispered. Now they were polite. It broke Donna’s heart, but she couldn’t let him see that. Stephen’s life, like his well-groomed body, was about order. Donna and her mess had never been right for Stephen’s world, and yet he loved their fat, wild, violent daughter.

  ‘You said you wanted to talk about Angel?’

  He still called her that. It had always annoyed her.

  ‘I hope you don’t blame me for keeping this from you, but I really didn’t want to tell you over the phone, and to be perfectly honest I was trying to get my head around it myself … I still am. It wouldn’t have helped us for you to be there last night and so I made a decision to handle it myself … tell you face to face.’

  ‘Handle what?’

  Donna could still read his body – the stiffness in his arms and spine and a tension in his legs as if he might spring up from the couch at any moment. The flicker of nerves anticipating his reaction made her forget the words she had prepared. She always seemed to speak out of turn and managed to rile him before he even knew why he should be angry.

  ‘Last night we were at the hospital and the police were involved.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The frown she was so used to confronting cut into Stephen’s brow.

  ‘Angela tried to commit suicide.’ Donna waited just a second before she continued, just long enough for Stephen’s lips to part under the weight of his jaw. ‘She took aspirin, and I know now that was a fantastic choice. If she’d taken paracetamol, we’d’ve lost her for sure. She vomited in the morning and that’s what alerted me. It all happened so fast. She was put on a drip right away, and then they gave her a drug called sodium … sodium bicarbonate which helped her to pee the aspirin out of her system.’

  She spoke quickly, almost without breathing, and now took a sharp intake of air.

  His hold on his tea slackened as her words reached him, so that the mug tilted, but not enough for the brown liquid to spill.

  ‘Kill herself? Jesus Christ. She’s only twelve …’

  Donna swallowed as Stephen put his cup down hard on the lamp table. ‘We were lucky, apparently. Almost any other drug and we would’ve lost her.’

  ‘But why? Was it school?’

  ‘I thought it was because of school. She’d been suspended for fighting again. I thought she was just acting out, being attention-seeking, but then she told me …’

  Stephen met her eyes.

  ‘She said a teacher at school, her drama teacher, sexually assaulted her.’ Tears suddenly clouded Donna’s eyes. ‘I wish she’d just told me …’ She put a hand over her mouth, but then pinched her nose to halt her tears. She remembered Angela’s bare legs opening to allow the white foam of her vomit to fall between her feet.

  ‘Oh no,’ Stephen whispered, wiping a hand over his mouth.

  There was a germinating silence. He covered his eyes with his right hand, elbow on his knee supporting his head. After another painful minute, he spoke.

  ‘So, let me get this right … she’s sexually assaulted at school and comes home and takes all these pills. How did she get the pills? Why did you not notice?’

  Not for the first time, Donna felt as if she were being interrogated.

  ‘She got suspended from school and we had an argument. She just went to bed and I didn’t know till the next morning.’

  Colour flushed his face suddenly. ‘You leave her all alone dealing with that, and what were you doing? Sitting down here guzzling the wine, I expect. Meanwhile she’s upstairs thinking about this pervert who’s attacked her and trying to kill herself.’

  Tears fell and Donna brushed them away. She needed to defend herself against blame but she had never once won an argument with him.

  ‘She’s become very difficult. You don’t see it like I do. They wanted to expel her from school. She’s a bully, they said. You should hear the things she says to me, the things she does to other girls …’

  He was shaking his head as if he wasn’t even hearing her. ‘So you call me and I’ll deal with it. You don’t know how to talk to her. You’re her mother and she needs your support, but all you do is lose your patience with her. Last time she was with me, she told me she didn’t think you even liked her.’

  Donna looked away. She recalled telling Angela that she hated her.

  ‘The minute this happened, you should’ve called me. I can’t believe you would keep this from me.’

  ‘I wanted to call you but the hospital was very intense,’ she said, doing what politicians did on the news – deflecting, choosing to answer one thing instead of another. ‘There were social workers and then police, and they all wanted to interview her, examine her … but Angela was having none of it and you know her, once she’s made her mind up.’

  ‘I should have been there,’ he said loudly, but seeming desperate.

  ‘It just wouldn’t have helped. Belie
ve me it wouldn’t.’ Donna reached out to him, fingers turned upwards. ‘It took me and the social worker a good few hours to persuade her to allow an examination.’

  ‘And what did they find? I mean, was she … raped?’

  Donna blinked twice. ‘They said there was no sign of penetration and she didn’t have any STIs. They didn’t get any biological evidence – hairs or skin cells or whatever else they hope to find … I don’t know,’ Donna shivered, although the heating was on full. She pulled her cardigan around her again. ‘The doctor did say that she was red, and a bit sore, but that could have been because of the assault or because of a normal rash or what have you.’

  ‘So what did she say … he did to her, then?’

  ‘Covered her mouth, pushed her up against the wall and grabbed her down there, inside her underwear.’

  Stephen was silent, his arms heavy on his knees, but Donna could sense the hurt and anger emanating from him. She couldn’t stand it any longer. She got up and opened the patio door and then lit a cigarette, inhaling with relief and desperation. She was trembling so hard she could feel it all the way up her back into her shoulders. It was hard for her to be in the same room as him. It wasn’t just this awful news and waiting for him to react, but it reminded her of how she had felt for years in his presence – stupid, irrelevant, unattractive. She had never been good enough, for him or his family. The first time Donna had met Stephen’s mother, the old woman had turned up her nose. Nice girls don’t have tattoos, she had said to Stephen after Donna had left. She knew that, because Stephen had told her.

  Donna sucked at the cigarette and watched him.

  He was staring into the distance, eyes reddened, a flush in his cheeks as if he were about to blow. Donna cleared her throat, preparing to say something pacifying, anything at all, but he spoke first.

  ‘I can’t believe this has happened,’ he said, whispering at the worn carpet, ‘But more than that, I … can’t believe that you kept this from me. I should have known, right away.’

  ‘It happened yesterday. I didn’t keep it from you. Yesterday morning I woke up to this,’ Donna shouted.

  She turned towards the garden to smoke in the hope that it would help her keep her temper. This was what she had expected. Blame. ‘I’m telling you now, aren’t I?’ she whispered. Smoke stung her right eye and she smudged a tear away with her thumb.