The Mute and the Liar

by Victoria Best

  I think it was just Mum that he didn’t want to leave the house, because he never said anything to me after she passed away. I started walking to and from school at an early age. Father didn’t really take notice of what I was doing or where I was going anymore. He just came home from work, sat in the kitchen and did some work or watched the television and I stayed in my room. I once decided to run away just to see if he would notice. I took a house key with me so I could let myself back in. It didn’t mean anything at the time; it was really just a game. I was only nine. I walked all the way to the Post Office and hung around there and then played in the telephone booth nearby. But then I got bored and went home. Father was still downstairs watching the television.

  Maybe he finally saw what it did to us. Mum insisted he was just trying to “keep us safe.” But that’s not what it was doing. Even I could see the way she shook when he raised his voice. Or the way she couldn’t pass a surface without drumming her fingers on it. And the urgent, agitated way she did anything, from cleaning to walking, as if she was constantly being timed.

  “Shut up! Just shut up!”

  I can see it now. I’m standing in the doorway, about to enter the living room after hearing shouting downstairs. And there she is. My beautiful mother, with her always shaking hands, almond eyes and dimples in her cheeks and her wispy, flyaway, light brown wavy hair that could never find the right place to fall, instead sticking out haphazardly.

  But she’s had enough. She’s broken now. The lights have gone off in her eyes.

  She’s standing in the middle of the living room, gun pointed at Father, who is cowering pathetically opposite, hand outstretched.

  It’s Father’s gun, the gun he uses when on patrol at work, the gun I’m not supposed to know about but I do, because even though I’m only eight, I have a habit of asking too many questions.

  “Please. Just listen to me. Put the gun down, Amanda,” Father pleads with her. She shakes the gun violently at him with accusing eyes.

  “You lock us up here like animals!” “Give me back the gun.”

  “But I am telling you; I will be free!” “Amanda, please-”

  “Shut up! Shut up!”

  I hear my own voice call out into what feels like vast nothingness that mutes my voice the moment it leaves my throat. “Mummy.”

  And then Mum screams the sentence that still haunts me today, stinging and buzzing incessantly like a wasp trapped in the back of my skull. “Just stop talking!”

  I know she’s not talking to me. She’s still talking to Father. But she was yelling. Loudly. And I didn’t like it. And so, like the typical eight- year-old I am, I start crying. Or howling, to be more precise. At the top of my voice, infused with deliberately loud gasps for air to really hit home that I am, in fact, crying, and that someone needs to do something about it, preferably hug me, fuss over me and dab my face with tissues.

  To my great surprise, none of those things happen, so I start screaming even louder.

  Mum does head towards me. I outstretch my arms, expecting to be hugged, but she pushes past me, through the doorway and straight downstairs. I run after her, a little excited, wondering where she is going. I see her opening the door to the garden. I don’t notice that she’s still carrying the gun.

  I’m slow at running. It’s a pain in the ass, especially when I have to do PE at school. But the fact that I am slow at running was a good thing that day. It meant I didn’t see it when it happened. I heard the gunshot just as I was heading downstairs.

  When I got outside, she was already lying on the floor, but her hair was covering the blood, so at first I didn’t notice anything. I picked up the gun, just to admire it. It’s a kid thing, you must have seen the way they investigate new, unfamiliar objects with such care and intensity it’s as thought they are examining potential alien life forms.

  I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I saw her. Suddenly Father was behind me. He moved slowly, head hung low. “What... What did you do?” And then he collapsed next to her, howling with tears.

  *****

  “I didn’t kill her. I know that’s not what you want to hear. I know you think it was some huge plot, some huge case, what you deal with every day. But this is something you couldn’t have stopped. I didn’t even see it happen. I just heard the gunshot when I was running down the stairs. She was already dead when I got outside.”

  “You’re lying to me! You murdered her, didn’t you? You killed her!”

  He has been thinking about this for so long. For him to go through all of this just to try and find out what happened to her.. Her death must have completely killed his rationality and infected his mind. It's probably the only thing he has been thinking about for years and years.

  “Do you know what the sad part is in all this? You know. You know I wouldn’t have done that, that I loved my Mum more than anything. How could I have wrestled the gun out of her hands and shot her? I was eight for Christ’s sake.” I almost smile as I say this. Until now my voice has been croaky and raspy and off key, the way anyone’s voice would be if they hadn’t spoken for so long. But I can hear I’ve gotten better, and when I said that, it almost sounded… powerful. My voice has finally settled, becoming steadier and self-assured. I feel fifty feet tall. And my father, hunched over in front of me, avoiding my eyes, looks ant-size.

  “You conjured up this whole stupid, ridiculous, ill-thought out plan, full of gaping holes and inconsistencies. You involved so many people and put them in danger. You risked my life… Jayce threatened to kill me several times. All of this... just to find out something you already knew.” In fact, I think I understand now. It makes sense. I stare him down, and he looks away and stares at the ground, head hung low, looking defeated. “Do you know what? You just can’t cope with the guilt knowing that it was you who killed Mum. You treated her badly and so we lost her.”

  He looks up jut for a moment to flicker briefly at the gun in my hands. I smile and reach one-handed for the phone on the side table next to me, keeping the gun steady with my other hand.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to kill you. I very much doubt Mum wants to see you just yet. But I know who will want to see you. All your colleagues. I’m sure they’ll have a great laugh hearing how the policeman they’ve been fighting bad with for years turned into a criminal himself.

  *****

  Crime: Imposter pretends to be deceased teenage girl, manipulating two of her friends to follow his orders. Imposter orders one of her friends to kidnap a girl he lives near. Imposter asks him to keep her hostage for three days at his friend’s house in Bath and tells him to only let her go when the ultimatum for her release has been fulfilled – for her father to kill the boy’s mother (boy has always hated his mother.)

  Interesting Details: Imposter only contacted the two boys through the deceased girl’s real phone. This was the reason they believed it was really her and followed the imposter’s orders. Also, imposter asked the boy who kidnapped the girl to see if he can get her to talk (hostage is a selective mute.)

  Alicia’s Answer: Imposter is a man named Charles Lewis, the father of the hostage, who was supposedly busy trying to kill the boy’s mother to fulfill the ultimatum.

  He is a detective chief inspector and found out about one of the boys through a case he was working on and discovered he lived very close to them. Researching the boy pulled up information about the murder of the girl Lewis pretended to be. By telling the police he wanted to reopen her case, he was given her mobile phone and had access to all the information he needed to pretend to be her and manipulate her two friends.

  He made it seem as though what he actually wanted was to help the boy complete his wish of killing his mother, which would give the boy an incentive to go along with the plan and would buy time whilst he was waiting for the ultimatum to be fulfilled. What he really wanted was for his daughter to start talking so he could find out what happened to his wife, who committed suicide seven years prior.

 
It was necessary that the boy take his daughter to Bath so he could utilise the other boy. He even briefly involved friends of the kidnapper to threaten his daughter into going along with the plan, despite the inconsistencies and questions that provoked, and he told the second boy to threaten someone he saw as a threat. He then needed to frame someone to cover up his tracks. He told the other boy to organise a party so he could dispose of the deceased girl’s phone discreetly because there would be many suspects if it led to an enquiry.

  If his daughter still had not spoken for three days, he presumably would have told the kidnapper just to set her free and that would have been the end of everything.

  Verdict: MAN IS A FILTHY, HEARTLESS, GOOD-FOR-NOTHING SCUMBAG WHO CAN ROT IN HELL FOR ALL THE HOSTAGE CARES.

  Outcome: I was right.

  Note to self: Remember notes for English essay 18th March.

  Epilogue

  Six months later

  28th September 2011

  He’s there. Sitting on a bench near the back, huddled in a black coat. His hair is much flatter than usual and looks much blonder, and his face looks softer somehow; the lines have softened in his forehead, his cheeks look rosier and his lips are pulled into a slight half-smile. As I draw in closer, he notices me and looks up, and I notice his eyes look warm, at ease. Contented, like an insomniac after a long night’s sleep.

  And everything feels right. He smiles at me, and all anger I had, all the boiling questions I was going to scream at him like why he left me for so long, everything disappears.

  *****

  “I didn’t think you would come,” he says.

  “Well, I haven’t had the chance to tell you off yet for being a crazy weirdo who disappeared off the face of the planet for six months.”

  “I’m sorry. I just needed to get away from everything.”

  “Why didn’t you come back? Why didn’t you call, or drop in, or speak to me, or something?”

  “Well I was just thinking to myself one day, England’s rubbish. It just rains all day and everyone hates each other. So I just said to myself, fuck it why not go to Las Vegas? They have casinos there. And girls. And everyone loves casinos and girls.” I laugh and he pauses for a moment, then says softly: “I just felt like I couldn’t come back. I needed to sort some things out. I was just… stupid.”

  “Okay,” I say, giving him a small smile.

  “I guess the real reason was that you hated me. So there really wasn’t much point in staying here anymore. I just… didn’t know how to deal with it, I guess. I didn’t want to be near you and know that you were avoiding me. Sorry, am I being weird again? Should I just stop talking now? People always tell me I have this thing where I don’t stop talking sometimes, especially at really inappropriate moments when I really probably should to save myself from getting a slap in the face. The trouble is, I never know when those moments are. So feel free to shut me up if this is one of those,” he jabbers, rushing through every word so they all fall into each other.

  “I already know. You never stop talking. And I didn’t talk at all. It’s silly, really. It’s like you said in that song you wrote for me; we make a really funny pair. We wouldn’t have worked anyway.”

  “Worked?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Your voice sounds really good.” Jayce stops mid-sentence, his cheeks burning red. “Crap, wait, that sounded weird. I meant that like… it sounds… like a voice. Not that your voice didn’t sound like a voice before, I just meant-”

  “It’s okay, I get it,” I laugh, deciding to be nice and not let Jayce continue digging himself a hole.

  “Are you still writing in that notebook?”

  “No. The mystery is all solved now; there’s nothing else to write about.”

  “Write about me. I’m awesome. Look, I can even balance my shoe on my nose.”

  In a fluid movement, he whips one shoe off and tries (and hopelessly fails) to put it on his nose, sending me spluttering into laughter.

  “That would make a good story, actually. Jayce, the vain show-off and his sidekick, the amazing acrobatic shoe. See the shoe balance where no shoe has balanced before!”

  “That book would sell like hotcakes. No, better than hotcakes. It would sell like those cakes with the white icing and the red cherry on the top and the jam in the middle.” He pauses and looks at me. “Everything has changed now, hasn't it? Nick and your dad are in prison. My gang's gone their separate ways. You've started talking. It's weird, isn't it?”

  “Yeah. But it's all sort of... worked out now. I'm living with my aunt, going to school. I've got friends now. It feels normal. Do you feel that way too?”

  “Yeah. I've got a job. Got my own place. Things are better now. Oh, Alicia, you know when you stopped speaking? Was that because of what happened?”

  “Yes. But there were other reasons as well. The police kept asking me questions. I felt like everyone was watching me. People didn’t believe me when I told them what really happened. Another reason was that I just didn’t want to.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “And you started lying nonstop because…”

  “I don’t know. You can make life better when you lie. I’m a genius. I’m an astronaut. I’m going out with a Victoria Secret model. See? When you have nothing to talk about, lying just seems like the better option. You know what, Alicia? I missed you.”

  “I missed you too.” I reply. And it’s true.

  “Hey, look what I bought today.” He fishes in his bag for a bag of salad, exactly the same as the one he stole from my fridge all those months ago.

  “I hate vegetables. Do you know what, I just hate anything that’s supposed to be good for you. Blood tests, dentists, cheese. What even is cheese? How do they put holes in it? But you know what, this stuff is kind of growing on me,” he grins and knocks the bag repeatedly against my arm. “Have it, I got it for you. I figured I owe you a bag, since, you know, I stole yours.”

  “I bet you can’t put ten of those leaf things in your mouth at once,” I challenge him.

  “Is this challenge just to shut me up?” he asks. I nod my head and grin. “Fine. Then challenge accepted.”

  He shoves his hand in the bag, we both laugh, and the world carries on.