Little Liar

by Lisa Ballantyne

  It was completely obvious what had happened. Her mother had been snooping in her room, looked at her private drawings and then put them back in the wrong order. Angela lay down on her belly and peered under her bed. The jewellery box was still there and she reached under and pulled it towards her. She sat up, queasy with worry that the ring, too, would be gone or in a different position.

  The diamond ring was still there, still strung on its chain and pressed into the ring cushion just as Angela had left it the night she took the aspirin. Donna hadn’t found it. Angela kissed the cold sparkling stone. There would have been trouble if her mother had found that. Girls her age didn’t own twocarat diamond rings, although Donna was probably too stupid to know exactly what it was.

  But Donna had found the drawings. Angela wanted to go down right now and kick her in the face. The snooping bitch. Instead she knelt and carefully sorted the drawings back into the order she liked them. She ran a hand over the pores of the paper, smoothing the pastel outlines of Nicholas Dean. She stopped when she found her favourite portrait. It was quite good, she decided. It didn’t look like she had painted it. It looked professional. She hadn’t shown it to anyone, except Jasmine, but they both agreed it looked like him. It was a real likeness. The watercolour had bled through the sketch lines, but other than that it looked like a real artist’s portrait. His cute smile that made him seem shy – she had almost captured it – and the light in his brown eyes that she had recreated with a tiny spot of white paint. Angela stood up, holding the picture in her hands, a flush of indignation coming to her cheeks.

  She laid the painting on her desk and picked up the calligraphy pen that Dean had given her. Don’t tell anyone I gave it to you, she remembered. The weight of it in her palm felt special. It had a long gold nib, about four millimetres in diameter. She had bought a bottle of ink to go with it, just like in the olden times, but she had only tried to write with it a few times. Angela took the dip pen and pressed the nib into a piece of thick drawing paper on her desk, scoring an invisible signature and a heart with its hard metal edge.

  She carefully slid the sketchbook under her bed, then threw open her bedroom door and ran downstairs. She was only wearing socks and she slid off the bottom step and had to catch herself on the banister to stop herself from falling. Her mother hung up the phone and turned towards her, cigarette pointed at the ceiling.

  ‘You were in my room, Donna. You’re not allowed to touch my stuff.’

  ‘You’d left dirty laundry all over the hall, as usual. I was just putting it in the basket where it belongs.’ Her eyes were too wide, not blinking, attempting innocence.

  ‘Didn’t mean you had to riffle through my stuff.’ Angela’s face flushed, squeezing the pen in her fist. Sweat broke along the crease of her palms.

  ‘I didn’t riffle through your stuff. I was putting the dirty laundry where it belongs and I saw the photos sticking out from under the bed.’ Donna crushed her cigarette into an ashtray on the table.

  ‘That’s a lie. You were snooping on me, ’cause you’re a nosy bitch.’

  Donna’s face was blotchy and afraid and Angela had never hated her so much in her whole life. She wanted to rip out her hair and stamp on her face.

  Her mother did a strange thing with her body, as if she was trying to straighten up and put her nose in the air, but her spine was still hunching over, like the coward she was. It made her seem awkward and uncoordinated. ‘Angela … I was going to come and talk to you about this anyway. I wanted to give you time. I wasn’t spying on you,’ she folded her arms, ‘but I was very concerned by what I saw. You need to be honest with me about what’s been going on with that teacher. Has he touched you more than once? Have you been out together?’

  Angela’s rage was quelled for a moment, like the tide sucking back before its rush towards the shore. She stared at her mother, breath heaving inside her.

  ‘This is the man you said assaulted you, and you have …’ Donna’s hand swirled upwards in a strange spasm, as she tried to find the words, ‘love notes to him, hidden in your bedroom? Drawings of him, love hearts …’

  ‘What do you mean, I said he assaulted me? Don’t you believe me?’

  Her mother folded her arms tighter over her body. Her face was ugly and cross. ‘I didn’t mean that. But you need to be honest with me.’

  ‘I hate you,’ Angela said, tears making her mother’s face blur. The rage was still in her arms. It was as if all the blood in her body had drained into her fists.

  ‘I need you to talk to me. What’s this all about? You need to tell me what happened with you and Mr Dean. You need to tell me all of it. I need to understand how you were hurt.’

  ‘I told you,’ Angela howled.

  Her mother was standing very close now. She was looking right into Angela’s eyes and when Angela glanced at her it was as if her mother’s face had expanded. Suddenly her face was huge and her murky green eyes enormous. Angela heard the thump of her own heart in her ears.

  She squeezed her fist and felt the pen in her grasp. In a single motion, without moving her body, she drew up her arm and stabbed the calligraphy pen into her mother’s cheekbone, just below the eye.

  Donna screamed and stepped back, a hand covering her cheek. Blood flowed through her fingers and she took her hand away and looked astounded at the red on her palm. The wound was already starting to swell.

  Angela felt a brief flood of relief, exhilaration, at the sight. It had felt the same when she pulled out Jasmine’s hair, but then a sickness washed over her. She was so bad. She was the worst girl in the world. She deserved to die. She wanted to die. Her arms were now heavy at her sides. The pen, nib inked in her mother’s blood, fell to the floor.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ her mother was saying, over and over, fingertips touching the wound which was swelling so fast that it made her left eye see wrong, pulled out of shape. ‘Oh no, oh, no, oh.’

  Angela rubbed her fist with her left hand, as if she had hurt it stabbing her mother. It did hurt, but not in her hand. It hurt somewhere else. She couldn’t find the hurt with her fingers.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  She turned and left the room as her mother propped herself on the table, then turned away and leaned against the wall.

  Angela closed her bedroom door and stood with her back against it, shoulder blades against the wood. She looked down at her white soft knuckles. She flexed her hand and watched the dimples form.

  One, two, three, four, five … she counted.

  Angela made a fist and punched herself in the cheek.

  It hurt, but not too much. It was easier to hurt other people than it was to hurt herself. She rubbed her cheekbone, then tightened her fist and raised her chin, clenching her teeth and pressing her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

  Once.

  Twice. She hit herself again and it brought tears to her eyes.

  Three times.

  She went to the mirror and looked at the swell. She pressed a palm against her cheek. She hadn’t broken the skin but the bone was tender and she thought it might bruise.

  On her knees, she retrieved her drawings of Dean and laid her favourite picture on her desk, smoothed a hand over his face. He had a beautiful face. She still remembered that first day when he came to Croydon Academy. She had been embarrassed because of his strange drama games, feeling stupid in front of the class, but he had squeezed her shoulder and said, well done, Angela, that was a really good job. He remembered names quickly. He knew everyone’s name after five minutes, yet still she had felt special.

  Nick.

  They were allowed to call him that.

  Nicholas.

  It was a nice name. Angela thought that she might call her baby that, if she had one and it was a boy.

  Angela opened a drawer in her desk and took out a strip of matches. She had pinched them from her mum a few months ago, when she had been trying to start smoking. It was hard to take up a habit that one of your parents excelled in – Angela ha
d only been reminded of her mum’s stinking breath and the sweet, dirty smell of her clothes. The first puff had made her sick.

  She had only tried smoking to see if it would make her lose weight. That was why models smoked, but Angela had given up after striking only one match.

  Now she opened the flap of the book of matches. She ran her thumb along the smart, red heads. Nine matches left. Nine like a cat’s lives.

  Angela opened the window and then climbed up on her desk so that she could peer through. Outside smelled oily and cold: cars and dirt and houses. It had just started to get dark and the sky was navy blue. The air was already smoky from chimneys that sent grey streaks into the night. The red-tiled roof was below Angela’s window and she leaned out onto it, to test the breeze. The tiles were slippery against the palms of her hands.

  She opened her sketchpad and lifted up her favourite painting of Nicholas Dean. She struck a match and lit the corner of the page, holding the painting up so that it burned and smoked out of the window. The flames were quick and hungry, a dark line drawing closer to the centre of the paper and vanishing Dean’s hair and ear. As the picture burned, Angela leaned out of the window further and kissed his lips. She liked the flames. She turned the paper in her hands and watched the flames turn and consume another part of the paper. She liked the heat and the danger, liked controlling it but knew that it was ultimately uncontrollable. Fire was the ultimate creation. It brought warmth and love and life, yet it also brought destruction. It was fed by the air, just like people. It brought light, and heat and community; it burned and ravaged and destroyed.

  More than any of that, it was the fire’s beauty that captivated Angela: that seductive flame, the bold glow, the taunting, tantalising tongues. Nicholas Dean’s face was consumed by it and disappeared. Suddenly the flames raced along the paper, towards Angela’s finger and thumb holding the painting to the air. She had been in a trance and the heat near her skin made her yelp. She drew back and let go of the paper and a twisting, turning flame floated into the bedroom and landed on the duvet.

  Angela turned from the window as the bed caught fire, a tiny crown of flames and then a strange slow fire that smelled strange. She didn’t know what to do, and she was just about to call out to her mother when her bedroom door slammed open, and Donna stood there, her right eye swollen and almost completely closed over, blood on her cheek and her neck.

  Standing on the desk, looking down at her mother, who now began to shout and then run down the stairs, Angela felt nothing but detached. It was as if she was surrounded by a hard, transparent shell and she was suspended inside, floating like a yolk, looking out, dumb and deaf.

  Angela climbed down from the desk. She stood with her hands at her sides and her stomach sticking out, watching the flames eat her bed. The smell was horrible, like microwaved plastic.

  Her mother appeared at the bedroom door brandishing an extinguisher. She squinted with her one good eye at the label, pointed the nozzle and pressed on the lever. White foam burst onto Angela’s bed. The flames died.

  There was an eerie silence. Even though the window was open, the air was blue with smoke and Angela couldn’t see her mother clearly. Donna dropped the extinguisher and it thudded onto the bedroom floor. The air was thick and hurt the back of her throat.

  ‘That’s it, Angela, we’re done.’

  Angela frowned in the smoke, not sure what her mother meant. She put the tip of her thumb into her mouth.

  ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ Her mother’s voice wasn’t angry, but tired. ‘I’ve had enough. You win. I’ll call your dad tonight. You can go live with him.’

  Looking at her mother through the transparent shell Angela felt tears at the back of her throat. The tears tasted of smoke.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said.

  Part Two

  ‘The rape of a young person is tragic … the person goes from knowing nothing to believing nothing.’

  Maya Angelou

  18

  Nick

  It was after lunch and Nick was in the study hunched over Marina’s work laptop. His parents were downstairs because they were going to pick up the children from the childminder and bring them home. He sat in his running clothes with Rusty at his feet.

  He opened his inbox and frowned. It was mainly junk mail – no new job requests since he had been fired from Croydon Academy. There was nothing from his agent, Harriet, although he had not expected it. Let’s take a fresh look at things once your crisis is over, she had said, and Nick had wondered if that meant that she was letting him go. She was right, of course. Getting parts was hard enough without police bail that restricted his contact with children and press coverage that implied he was a paedophile.

  His crisis. A good way of putting it. When would it ever be over?

  Email done, he opened Facebook and Twitter and Google. Marina’s work laptop was so slow that each window took minutes to open. He looked out at the paper bark maple tree; its fine autumn colour now gone, leaves curling in on themselves before falling. He was trying to stay strong but he felt as if he was corroding on the inside. He ran his fingers through his hair as he waited for the websites to open, then, unable to restrain himself, he typed his name into Google.

  Sweat breaking at his temples as if he had already started his run, he found a Facebook page called ‘Croydon Parents Against Paedophiles’ set up just one week ago. One of the recent posts carried a link to the Evening Standard story about him. The post, by ‘Admin’ read, ‘Check out what happened at Croydon Academy. Parents Against Paedophiles need to act. Stop child abusers hurting our kids.’

  Nick read compulsively, thumbnail between his teeth. There were links on the page to his business website, ACTUp, his Wikipedia page, and also his agent’s website as well as more innocuous links to Childline and the local police station. Below a photograph of him, beaming at the premiere of Scuttlers, a number of comments had been posted, and Nick expanded the tab to read.

  I hear the police have let him out. That poor girl will be scarred for life and he’s free out there – wandering around ready to molest another of our kids.

  Paedophiles are worse than terrorists.

  It makes me sick that people like Dean actually seek out jobs with children.

  Trembling, Nick closed the laptop and sat back in his chair. It had been nearly two months and his bail was soon up. He was close to the end of this. The police still didn’t have enough evidence to charge him and they were running out of time.

  He got up and went downstairs, Rusty scampering at his heels, then sat on the chair in the hall to put on his trainers.

  ‘Are you going out?’ his father said, standing before him with his arms folded.

  ‘I’m just going for a quick run round the park. I’ll be back before the kids get home.’

  ‘Your mum’s just going for them now.’

  ‘I said I’d be back.’ Nick looked up at his father, whose face was forbidding, unspoken words crowding into his eyes. ‘I just need to loosen up.’

  His father straightened, inhaled and said, ‘How are you doing for money?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Nick said, tying his laces and raising an eyebrow as he looked up at his father.

  ‘I know lawyers aren’t cheap.’ His face had aged and the skin now hung around his predominant emotions, so that his neutral expression was one of anger and disappointment.

  ‘We’re okay, thanks though.’ Nick pulled down the cuffs of his running shirt and flexed his toes, suddenly desperate to be outside.

  ‘It must be a burden on Marina, though. I just wanted to offer – give you a few grand towards the lawyer.’

  Nick shrugged, feeling suddenly shorn. ‘Lawyer’s not asked for any money yet …’ Nick whispered, not wanting his mother to hear, although he was sure they had discussed the offer of money. ‘Thanks anyway,’ he managed, despite his humiliation.

  ‘Well … you just let me know if you need anything.’

  Craving the cold air ag
ainst his face and the rhythm of his feet on the pavement, as if he could somehow outrun all of this, Nick turned for the door.

  Just then, as he was sliding ear buds into his ears, his phone rang. Instead of talking through the microphone on his headphones, he unplugged the jack and the speakerphone projected, ‘Mr Dean, this is Detective Sergeant Brookes …’

  Nick quickly took the phone off speaker and turned slightly away from his father, although he knew he had heard. Thomas Dean frowned.

  ‘Hello,’ said Nick, trying to keep the hope from his voice. This could be it – the moment when the nightmare stopped.

  Brookes cleared her throat. ‘I was just calling to advise you that your bail is being extended a further three months to give us more time to gather evidence …’

  Nick squeezed his left fist, cleaving inside.

  ‘But, what do you mean? How can it take this long? I’m innocent.’ He was whispering but the emotion in his voice brought his mother to the door of the living room. ‘How can you just,’ he punched his thigh with his fist, ‘just … extend it, back to square one, start all over again?’

  ‘We need more time to complete our investigation.’

  Nick hung up, closed his eyes for a couple of seconds to compose himself, then held up a palm to delay the questions from his parents as he called Faldane. Fingers rubbing his mouth and the stubble on his chin, Nick listening to the ring, expecting that Faldane’s phone would go to answerphone, but just then, he picked up.

  Nick talked and Bob interrupted. ‘Don’t worry. It’s to be expected. I told you this would take months, perhaps longer.’