Little Liar

by Lisa Ballantyne

  ‘Nick?’ she called again, standing at the bottom of the stairs and looking upwards.

  It was then that she noticed Marina’s handbag and keys by the phone. Her daughter-in-law must have come home early and now they were upstairs together.

  Betty sniffed in slight annoyance as she went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. She checked on the children in the lounge. Ava was emptying toys from a box beside the sofa, her bottom lip protruding. ‘I want the iPad,’ she whined.

  Betty knew that their own tablet had not yet been returned from the police but Melissa had loaned them another, knowing how much the children would miss it.

  ‘I don’t know, darling,’ Betty said, turning on the television and scrolling to the children’s channel in the hope that it would distract her. ‘I’ll have a look for it in a moment.’

  Luca was in the corner, jacket still on, hovering over some cut-out paper sculptures that he had made earlier in the week.

  ‘Luca, take your coat off, please,’ said Betty. ‘I’ll make you both a snack.’

  ‘Okay,’ called Luca, without turning, still focussed on the paper tower.

  ‘Take your coat off.’

  As Betty turned to leave the room, Luca shrugged his anorak to the floor. The action was the only sign that he had heard her.

  Betty took her cigarettes from her handbag and carried her cup of tea to the kitchen window. She opened the window and lit the cigarette, frowning and blinking as smoke drifted into her eyes.

  She loved her grandchildren, all of them – perhaps Luca and Ava most because they were the youngest, and because they were Nick’s – her baby’s babies – but the extra childcare duties were draining. She was getting too old to carry little children around and deal with tantrums.

  She took a mouthful of sweet milky tea and then a drag of her cigarette. Ever since that Sunday when Nick told them about his arrest she had had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach and a pain up the back of her neck.

  Tom often became frustrated with her because she took everything to heart. She felt what was happening to Nick in her own body, as if it was she who was facing prison. Her nerves had been shot since she had lost her own job in 1997.

  She coughed a little – the rumbling, deep chest, ever-present cough that shamed her because it meant that she needed to stop smoking. Nick would always be her baby. Her firstborn, Mark, was like his dad, and liked to take his time about things; and so his birth had been the definition of labour – nearly three days until he appeared, weighing over ten pounds. Melissa, even though she was a middle child, had always been independent and high achieving, perhaps because she had been the only girl. Melissa liked to do everything her own way, and so her birth had also been difficult. She had been breech and then she seemed to right herself, before finally coming out bum first. Betty had needed ten stitches after Melissa.

  Nick had slipped out like a seal. He was the best-looking of all her children and the sweetest. She remembered long afternoons looking at books or watching TV together with Nick snuggled into her. He had been the most affectionate child. It was wrong to have children thinking that they would give you something back, but Nicholas had always returned so much love.

  She smiled, eyes watering, just remembering him, butter blond and huge brown eyes. Tom said that he was easily distracted, lacked discipline, but Betty knew that her son, Nicholas, was the best thing that she had ever done.

  Feeling the chill from the window, Betty flicked the ash from her cigarette outside. It was then that she noticed the iPad and an opened sunglasses case with some cigarette papers sticking out of it. She frowned a little and flicked open the case. There was a polythene bag inside and Betty stubbed out her cigarette so that she could inspect the contents. It looked like dried herbs still on the stem. She sniffed it, then zipped the sunglasses case and put it to the side of the counter. She cleared her throat and closed the window, picking up the iPad for Ava.

  Just then, she heard raised voices coming from the top of the stairs. Betty held onto the banister as she looked up towards the sound. It was Marina and Nick arguing.

  For a few moments, Betty listened. Mostly it was Marina shouting at Nick, a tangle of Spanish and English. She didn’t know how they could live that way. It was hard enough to communicate with her own husband in one language, let alone two.

  Betty acknowledged a twinge of resentment: that her daughter-in-law had time to come home and fight with her son but didn’t have time to collect her own children from the childminder. Worried that the children would hear them fighting, Betty went into the lounge.

  ‘Do you want some toast, then?’ she asked.

  Luca was absorbed with the scissors and more paper. His grandpa had given him a ream of old fax paper and Luca seemed to have worked out a pattern where he could create a concertina of characters. Ava’s face lit up at the sight of the iPad.

  ‘And can I have some milk too, please Granny?’ Ava said, the madam, all eyelashes.

  ‘Those beautiful manners can certainly get some milk.’

  Ava preened at the compliment, thudding her heel on the floor. Betty was grateful that there had been only English spoken since she had collected Luca and Ava from school. Her granddaughter sometimes spoke in Spanish to Betty – unaware that she couldn’t understand. As a teacher, Betty felt this language experiment was too much to impose on the children, but Nick had been offhand. They’ll work it out in their own time.

  Betty’s experience of children – and she had a lot: three of her own and a long teaching career – had taught her that children did not value adult agendas being imposed on them. But who was she? She was only the grandmother.

  The children seemed oblivious to their parents’ argument in the upstairs bedroom. Betty closed the lounge door behind her and crept upstairs. She meant to use the bathroom, although there was a toilet downstairs and going up hurt her hip. If her son and daughter-in-law came out, she would have no good excuse. They would know she was eavesdropping.

  At the top of the stairs, Betty bristled and froze. Marina was losing it, shouting at Nick like she had never heard before.

  ‘On our daughter’s iPad? Who does that? On the iPad that your daughter uses to play games? What’s wrong with you? It disgusts me.’

  Betty frowned, confused as to what she meant.

  There was the sound of Nick apologising. Betty stood at the top of the stairs, alert. Was he crying? A helpless pang of frustration drove her into the bathroom. She locked the door.

  It felt as if her son was going through what she herself had suffered years before. She sat down on the toilet seat listening to the muffled sounds of the argument through the door. Nicholas was her son. She loved him. She believed in him. She would support him, no matter what. Whatever they said he had done, he was innocent. She knew his heart.

  Betty knew what it was to have her integrity questioned. Memories that she was accustomed to suppressing blistered in her mind.

  She was a mother of sons.

  That was all that was in her mind as Marshall Henderson stood, scraped his chair back and faced her. He was fifteen years old and bursting with swagger like the angry pimples on his cheek. He was a strange combination of child and man – emotional and petulant but ripped with anger – muscles new and hard on his still-growing frame. He was taller and wider than she was, but he seemed to take up an even larger metaphysical space, dominating the room, spreading out, like liquid turning to gas.

  ‘What you going to do about it?’ he challenged her, all thrust and tilt.

  He was Nicholas’s age, but even Mark would not have spoken to her in this way.

  ‘Leave the classroom now.’

  As the words left her mouth, she acknowledged her vulnerability. Teaching was all about performance. She had learned that early in her career – the first students she had stood before had taught her the need to act as if she was in control. The truth was projected; it didn’t need to be real.

  Marshall’s challe
nge was absolute, and her guise fell around her ankles.

  Betty had never been an authoritarian teacher. Most students were won over by her maternal nature, her love of the subject. Teaching was glorious to Betty: it was about giving inspiration, unlocking promise. It was passing on a secret. Her whole career, Betty had never lost that feeling. But in the last few years, the struggle to enforce discipline had worn her down. It seemed as if every lesson became a battleground, a few children becoming darkly empowered – knowing their rights, their dues, their scope.

  Marshall stood his ground, pushing his shoulders back as his eyes narrowed. Betty repressed a flutter of panic behind her breastbone. She had to maintain authority. She had to seem unafraid but her fingertips were trembling.

  ‘Leave the classroom, now,’ said Betty, raising her chin, using all the air inside her to give her voice heft, yet heard inside her own head, her voice sounded as afraid as she felt.

  He was so big, so intimidating.

  ‘Go fuck yourself, Miss.’

  She didn’t even think about it. There was no moment of consideration, no cognition. It happened quick as a reflex. She hit him so hard it jarred her shoulder, and yet he didn’t flinch. His height, his wall of muscle, was no match for her. He smiled.

  She was aware of the silence in the class. Aware of the burn in her face, at the back of her throat, the sting on her palm. The whole class, each pupil whose face she recognised, was turned to her in shock and disbelief.

  Betty almost had no breath, but she pushed back her shoulders. ‘Did you hear me? Get out of this class,’ she said in a voice that was so quiet but full of control.

  It was a voice that even today Betty was still proud of – when everything shattered and smashed to the ground it was the shards that caught the light that she held dear. She may have been wrong that day, but she had held her ground.

  Marshall just laughed at her. There was a faint pinking of his cheek where she had struck him.

  ‘Well, I know one thing,’ he had said, as quietly as she had just spoken to him, ‘you’re fucked now.’ No one else in the class claimed to hear him, but Betty heard every word.

  He left the room, and she had felt satisfied and relieved, if only for the next twenty minutes. She was the mother of sons and she would not be spoken to in that way.

  But Marshall had been true to his word.

  As soon as he left the room he lodged an official complaint and then there had been parents, and the head teacher and social workers and the trade union.

  She apologised, admitting that she was wrong, to the student, his parents, her union, the school and the local authority, but it had not been enough. Losing her temper meant that she lost her job and her pension, just months before she had been due to retire.

  The truth had not mattered. Marshall had played an innocent victim, abused by her. For the school, justice being seen to be done had been more important than justice itself. It was this deeper violation that she feared for Nick.

  Just then there was a thud from their bedroom and Betty put her fingers over her mouth.

  ‘It’s always the woman’s fault,’ she heard Marina shout.

  16

  Donna

  ‘Did you have fun at your dad’s then?’

  It was Sunday night and Angela had just returned home.

  Angela nodded once. She was curled in an armchair scrolling through her phone.

  ‘Did you go out for dinner?’

  ‘Pizza.’ Angela didn’t even look up.

  Donna raised her eyes. ‘What did you do on Saturday?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  Her sullen, pale face was turned from Donna, evading any communication, the light reflected from her phone lending her skin a bluish hue. Angela was receiving messages, one after another, but Donna didn’t have the courage to ask who they were from, fearful of another fight. She needed to talk to Angela about what she had found in her sketchpad, but didn’t know how to broach it.

  Words came into being in her mind, then burst, quick as soap bubbles. It was hard to remember when they had last spoken civilly to each other. Every communication wounded. Donna reacted to what she imagined Angela was saying, while her daughter overreacted to everything. It was as if they were speaking two entirely different languages.

  Donna stood in the middle of the room with her arms at her sides, knowing that she needed to try and reach her daughter.

  ‘I was thinking your room needs decorating again.’

  Angela met her eye and Donna took a step closer.

  ‘We can go and you could choose some paint this week, if you like? Freshen it up a bit. Could be fun. Change the colour. Help to take your mind off things.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  A shrug.

  ‘I just thought if we changed something it would help – a fresh start for you.’

  Angela’s eyes flashed violet, scrutinising.

  ‘What colour do you think you might like?’

  ‘I don’t want one colour. I want to paint stuff, right on the wall. I want to do, like, a mural or something, right on the wall.’

  Donna swallowed, and folded her arms. ‘Well, what kind of mural? What would you paint?’

  ‘Dunno, I’d do anything I liked, but right onto the wall.’

  ‘But what would you paint?’

  ‘Whatever I wanted.’

  ‘Like what, though? Flowers or a rainbow?’

  ‘I’m not six.’ Angela’s face crumpled in disgust.

  ‘You could paint some big pictures instead and then we could put them up after we’ve painted.’

  ‘No,’ Angela’s brow furrowed. ‘I want to do a big mural right on the wall.’

  ‘But what if you make a mess of it?’

  ‘I can just paint over it.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s such a good idea.’ Images flashed in her mind of the portraits she had seen in the sketchpad. She imagined the face of Nicholas Dean on Angela’s bedroom wall. ‘It might end up looking like graffiti.’

  ‘No, it won’t.’ A sulk taking hold.

  Donna took a long slow breath in, knowing that Angela was challenging her, but aware that if she rose to it, there would be an explosion. ‘Well, let’s go to the shops tomorrow and you can look at paint anyway,’ she decided as a compromise.

  Angela’s eyes flickered back to her phone.

  ‘Have you thought any more about getting some counselling, love? Like the nurse said?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘You remember at the hospital? They want you to go and talk to someone about what happened?’

  ‘Um, yeah,’ Angela nodded, her face suddenly seeming younger. Spontaneously, but with a self-conscious effort, Donna leaned down and tousled her daughter’s hair, which was greasy. Angela didn’t pull away and so Donna felt encouraged.

  ‘It would probably help, you know, talking to someone.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’ Phone and thumbs held up to her face.

  ‘Your birthday soon. Teenager, eh?’

  Angela relinquished a small smile.

  ‘What do you want to do? Go out for dinner, just the two of us?’

  ‘Dad too,’ Angela said, chin doubling, suddenly sulky.

  ‘Whatever you want. It’s your birthday, after all. Can’t believe you’ll be thirteen already. Where did the time go?’

  Donna sighed then reached out to touch Angela’s hair again, smoothing it with her fingers. It clung in clumps, the strands not separating, and it distracted Donna from her comforting task.

  ‘You need to wash your hair.’

  ‘Later.’ Almost inaudible.

  ‘It feels like you haven’t washed it all weekend. You need to shower a lot more now, you know.’ Donna withdrew her hand. ‘You’re not a little girl any longer. Every morning. Or else you’ll smell.’

  Angela launched herself up from the armchair, her pale face twisted into anger and hate. ‘You smell, you stupid old cow. You stink.’

  Donna stood back, hand on her chest
from fright as Angela charged past her and up the stairs.

  She started to follow, then turned back into the living room. Her fingers trembling, Donna took a cigarette and lit it, swinging open the patio door. She sucked hard on it, castigating herself for failing again. It would be hard to ask about the photographs now and Donna wasn’t sure if she should show them to the police or not. She would ask Stephen’s advice.

  Her cigarette was smoked halfway already, and Donna had stopped shaking. There was an ominous silence from upstairs. Donna crushed the butt against the side of the house and dropped it into the ashtray. She felt trapped. It reminded her of a video she had watched of an ant on a piece of white paper unable to escape a circle drawn around it in black marker pen – a perceived barrier that could not be crossed.

  What had happened to her and Angela? The breach between them was palpable, and yet they had once been close.

  She closed the patio door and shivered. There was no other choice. She knew she had to go upstairs and face her.

  17

  Angela

  Angela slammed her bedroom door and rested her head against the wood, making a face as if she was about to cry, but she couldn’t. When she had been little, she had cried all the time, so she didn’t understand where her tears had gone. In the bedside table she kept a secret supply of chocolate. She opened the cabinet and reached through a shiny mess of empty wrappers until she found a Twix. She sat on the bed, breathing heavily down her nose as she ate with concentration. No other thoughts crossed her mind until the crunch of the biscuit had ended and the last sweet melt of chocolate passed over her tongue. She sat with her hands at her sides, looking down at her feet, buffeted by the swarm of feelings inside her. It was hard to sit still. Just then she noticed that her sketchpad was poking out from underneath the hem of the bed sheet. Angela’s heart began to pound and she dropped down onto all fours on the carpet and pulled the pad out. Right away, she could tell something was wrong. The drawings were sticking out at angles like badly shuffled playing cards. With trepidation, Angela opened the first page.

  Drawing one should have been her father, then the autographed photograph that Mr Dean had given her – a still from Scuttlers – then it should have been the rough pencil sketches she had made of Mr Dean on his first week at Croydon High. They were bad because they had been sketched in class – his nose too pointy, his eyes too large. The next picture should have been her favourite, the painted drawing of him – a life-sized portrait that was a likeness. It had taken her three evenings to finish it. Instead she found the printouts from the internet that she had used to trace his face.