The Liar’s Chair

by Rebecca Whitney

  I dial her mobile and this time I don’t withhold the call-box number: now that I’ve heard her speak, I find I don’t care any more if I’m discovered.

  ‘Yes, hello?’ Her voice is brusque and flustered.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, ‘is this Claire Kenny?’

  ‘Yes. Who is this?’

  ‘Did you used to be Claire Williams?’

  ‘Yes. Who wants to know?’

  ‘I have some information about your father.’

  ‘What?’ The line crunches, as if she’s changing hands, then her voice comes back clearer and more serious now. ‘What information? Who are you?’

  ‘I know where your father is.’

  ‘My father?’ Her voice crackles and becomes louder. ‘How do you know my pa? That bastard’s been gone for over thirty years. What makes you think I want to know where he is now?’

  A pause.

  ‘Hello?’ she says. ‘Are you still there? Who is this? Is this some kind of wind-up?’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ I move the receiver to my other ear and take a breath. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Look, who are you and what do you want?’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’ My voice breaks up. Words lurch and stutter. I hadn’t expected this. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean for it to happen.’ Not until we spoke did I realize what I was expecting. Resolution. Atonement. Forgiveness.

  ‘An accident? What are you talking about, what’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t know if I’ll get another chance, but I wanted to tell you with my own words. I believe he was a good man.’

  ‘If he thinks I’m coming to get him after all these years, then he’s got another thing coming.’ Her voice becomes cloudy, as if she’s holding her hand over the receiver. ‘Jesus, Paul,’ I can make out, ‘I’ve got some nutter on the phone, says she’s got my dad. There’s been some kind of accident.’ I hear the man mumble, then she comes back on. ‘Look, who are you? Where did you get my number?’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you about your father. I know all about you, you wrote him letters, you had a cat called Mouse.’

  ‘What the fuck is going on? How do you know that?’

  ‘I know because I was with him at the end.’

  ‘The end? What end?’ she says. ‘What are you telling me?’ Then her voice is muffled again. ‘Somebody help me here.’ In the background something smashes and a child screams. ‘Paul, get the police on the other line. No, do it fucking now!’

  ‘No, please, don’t waste your time,’ I manage to say. ‘They can’t do anything, and I want to explain. I know what you’ve been through, I know what it’s like to lose your father, but I believe he had his reasons. If you could see what I saw.’

  Claire is shouting. ‘You let me talk to him. You put my pa on the phone.’ She’s ranting, probably not listening, so I raise my voice.

  ‘I’m really sorry. It was all my fault but I didn’t mean to do it. He was just there on the road when I came round the corner.’

  ‘What road, for Christ’s sake?’ Claire cries. ‘Is he dead, is that what you’re saying? Tell me what you’ve done to him!’

  ‘Yes, he is. I’m sorry. He’s dead.’

  ‘Dear God.’ Her voice becomes distant. Silence. Crackling, then sobs. A man asks her what’s the matter. ‘Leave me alone,’ she says.

  ‘Are you there?’ I say. ‘Can you hear me? I want to tell you I’m sorry, for everything. Please, forgive me.’

  Back on the line now, and full volume. ‘What did you say?’ She’s screaming and I have to hold the receiver away from my ear. ‘You fucking bitch. Who are you to bring him back into my life after all these years, you have no idea. And with this! You ask for my forgiveness? How dare you! You deserve nothing.’

  A man comes on the line. ‘Leave my wife alone, do you hear? We’ve got your number and we’ve called the police.’

  I bang down the phone. The receiver clangs on its support and the sound holds in the air like a tuning fork, then softens and blends into the silence of the night. I think of Claire and her husband left in their own noise and confusion, in another room across a sea. I pick up the receiver to call again, but I’ve said all I need to say so put the phone back on its cradle, softly this time.

  As I leave the phone box, the door squeaks and thumps shut behind me. Cold oxygen fills my lungs. I inhale and exhale fast and loud, and do it over and again until I’m dizzy.

  Behind me the phone in the box rings and I jump. It must be Claire. Or the police. I turn and stare at the receiver as if I can will it to stop, but it doesn’t. The chrome and glass of the shelter chops the reflection of the trees into disjointed fingers, and a just-risen moon stretches round the contours of the metal. I walk into the big city park with a slow steady pace and listen to the phone drill behind me. It stops then starts again. The park is the kind of place where it’s unsafe for a woman to be on her own at night. Trees lock round dark shadows. Leaves rustle. A swing in the children’s playground squeaks with the ghost of the wind.

  Time has been coming for me, always, trucking forward, and I’ve been fooling myself I could outrun it by hiding behind an upstanding life. And now the time has come to let go, it’s a relief. There are no more decisions to make, and nothing else I can do to make anything right. I sense a large animal hidden in the undergrowth, pacing alongside me. Its eyes flash as if caught by the headlights of a car. Inside my pocket my fingers find a piece of Seamus’s miniature skeleton.

  In the distance the phone stops ringing. The clouds have cleared and the air chills. Two stars puncture the night. Later the sky will burst.

  22

  GRAVEL

  There’s only one thing I need from the B & B: David’s ledger. It’s already in a brown envelope, and I scribble Will’s address on the front and post it from outside the hotel before I head towards the Downs. By car or bus it’s a fair journey home, but I choose to walk the rest of the way. As I leave the city I look down from the hills on to the thousands of lights, each one a person in a room congealed into their daily routines. Rustles and squawks in the trees next to the road keep me company, and I decipher the night-time language: the quest for food and the defence of territories. Light footfalls crunch in the undergrowth as the creature from the park parallels me along the road.

  About twenty minutes into my journey and the nightly bus I could have caught home if I’d waited passes me by. There’s no pavement here, and the tube of tungsten swerves into the road to avoid me, blaring its horn. All around, the night erupts. There’s not a single passenger on the bus, and from behind as I watch the vehicle recede into the night, it appears as if there’s no driver either.

  I’d made a pact with myself and thought I’d left David for good, but my only other option is the police, and prison seems pedestrian compared to what I have coming. Whatever David has in store for me will be worse than anything I can do to myself. Even so, as long as I keep moving the fantasy of escape still exists, and finally I understand Seamus’s attempts to obliterate the insistent memory of family by putting one foot in front of the other. There’s still some gin left in the bottle in my bag. I go to take a swig but can’t face it, and throw the bottle into the hedgerow. My stomach grumbles but it doesn’t matter; I’m cold but it doesn’t matter. I pass through villages and back out into the countryside, mapping in my mind the islands of towns and the strings of access that tie them all together: Maudlyn Lane, Shooting Fields, Chanctonbury Ring, Spithandle Lane. I stop for a while next to a sand quarry of such enormous scale it looks as if the devil has dug his giant hand into the hillside and scooped out the earth.

  From the barbed-wire perimeter the quarry stretches forward a mile or so and, even in this light, the earth is streaked with layers of sediment, like dirty gold set down by a prehistoric river. I squat there to piss. Steam lifts from my urine; my skin is ice but inside I’m still full of heat.

  The moon is high, diminished in size now by the expanding miles of black sky. When a car passes I
hide in the undergrowth, though for most of the way the roads are quiet. In the distance I hear a motorbike zipping through the gears, and a recollection from school days comes, of Mike giving me a ride home on the back of his bike – a noisy 50cc bullet. He’d followed me from the school gates until I agreed to get on. The faster he went, the harder I had to hug into him, and he approached a blind summit with such speed that we flew from its peak. At the moment of impact, when the wheels landed with a skid, I remember thinking, ‘This is it, the end of my life,’ and the finality was a relief because after that I wouldn’t have to think about dying any more.

  My legs are weak, my feet sore, and from here on the rest of my journey home is a slow surrender. It takes me several hours to reach our gates, by which time it must be at least midnight. On the road near our entrance, a crappy car is parked half-on, half-off the grass verge. David will be cross if it leaves tyre marks. He’ll probably line the verge with wooden posts to claw back these inches of territory.

  Normally I’d use a fob to open the gates, but without my keys I have to use the keypad. The motor clunks into action and the gates pull open on to our gravel drive, lit silver. Trees are cut-outs against a backdrop of stars, and the ground is flecked with the black magic of frost. As I walk through, the gates buzz shut behind me. A light from the house filters through the bushes. It switches off. The bulbs on the gateposts extinguish. Darkness, lit only by the lamp of the moon. Skin the shade of death.

  I approach the house where the twin beasts of mine and David’s cars are parked with their eyes facing forward. I touch the bonnet of my car, remembering the thrill of the engine singing, changing down the gears for control round a corner, but always keeping the speed as high as possible as I explored roads and cut-throughs, getting lost, finding my way, creating an ever-wider map of the countryside in my head. My car was built to be driven this way, and I miss the times before the accident when I used to drive carefree as routine, racing forward, hoping somehow to speed into the future and leave myself behind.

  A noise: the rub of the front door opening, but all I see is black. A few feet from the house, and a figure steps into the wash of the moon. The shape, the walk – it’s David. But then who else did I think it would be?

  His feet crush a beat in the gravel and his frame veers towards me. We face each other across the bonnet of my car. He opens the passenger door and gets in, into my private space. The vehicle rocks gently with his weight. He leans across and opens the driver’s door.

  ‘Get in,’ he says. And I do.

  We stare at each other. Moonlight catches the liquid in David’s eyes. Moments ago I was on the open road, I was safe, I still had a choice. Or did I? Have I ever had options or was it always leading to this? Somewhere in my mind I knew the ending, as if time had made a contract with me, and I should have cut out the middle years and been done with it.

  ‘I knew you’d come home,’ David says.

  He snatches my bag from me, opens and inverts it, and sprays the contents over his lap. Coins clatter to the floor. My wedding ring spins for a second on the dashboard then drops. Claire’s picture slides through a gap in the seats. We both scrabble for the photo, but David gets it first and holds it away from me as I reach for him. He pushes me with his free hand back into my seat as he squints at the picture, flipping the paper over a couple of times. Then as I lunge at him, the gear stick jabbing in my hip, he rips her down the middle, then in half again. I’m on top of him trying to grab the picture and I swipe his face, but the photo is already in pieces. David throws the confetti to the ground and grabs my wrists so tight that my hands fizz, and he shoves me back in my seat. My shoulder slams against the door and my arms go limp. Blood sparkles back through to my fingers when he lets go.

  He points at me. ‘Don’t. You. Move.’ A fleck of his spit lands in my eye.

  I freeze as he wipes his face with the back of his hand. The blood on his cheek smears black. From his pocket he takes a tissue and wets it with his mouth then dabs his cheek, flicking down the sun visor to check the cut in the mirror. A small light comes on and yellows his skin. His eyes flit between me and his reflection. When the scratch is cleaned, he pats the visor back up to the ceiling and rounds his gaze to me. Once again we are moonlit.

  The contents of my bag lie at his feet. He catches my glance and follows it to the watch. He leans forward and picks it up, then brings it slowly to the middle of the space between us.

  I shoot towards him but he’s prepared this time, and before I reach the watch, he holds his hand up flat and pushes me back in my seat. With his other hand he smashes the face of the watch on the dashboard. The glass shatters. ‘Enough,’ he says, ‘I’ve had enough.’ He throws the broken pieces at me and an edge of metal cuts my forehead. ‘All this junk!’ He holds his hands up and shakes his head. ‘I don’t know what any of it means, but I’ll bet most of it’s got something to do with that fucking tramp.’ I grab the remains of broken cogs from the floor and hold them tight. ‘I know you got a number from Toby,’ he says, and he nods at the pieces of the photo scattered on the floor. ‘Who was she anyway? Have you called her yet? Does she know where you are?’

  I don’t reply, but stare at him, trying not to cry.

  David sits back and breathes deeply for several seconds, smoothing down his jacket, patting his hair, composing himself as he would for a client, making sure all outward signs of battle are concealed. If nothing else, it’s good to see that I’ve rattled him. David touches the scratch on his cheek. The blood is nearly dry but a piece of the tissue has stuck to his face, as if he’s had a shaving accident. He picks the paper off and flicks it to the floor.

  ‘The police called round,’ he says, taking a few breaths before he’s fully calm. ‘They’ve found paint chippings on the dead man’s clothes. The paint is from a car, the same make and colour as yours. They’re questioning everyone in the area who owns or has owned one.’ He angles his body directly at me and the car see-saws. ‘It’ll take a while to whittle it down, and even though we reported yours stolen, they’ll need more information about where you left the car. They’ll be searching CCTV footage of the area now too, but the state you’re in you’ll confess at the first opportunity. And then what else will you tell them? What other little revelations do you have up your sleeve? About me and the business? I’m sure you know less than you think, but I’m not going to take any chances.’

  I breathe in short, shallow bursts. ‘Then you need me more than I need you.’

  David laughs. Watching him, I sense that this is his biggest performance to date, and without the satisfaction of having me at home he’s been psyching up and rehearsing for days, testing his bad-guy-with-a-heart in front of the mirror.

  ‘I don’t care what you’ve done, Rachel, but I do care about the business. I won’t jeopardize everything for some tiny incident you’ve managed to turn into a bloody catastrophe. Nobody gives a shit about that man, he was a drunk and a loser, but you’ve chased it and chased it. I don’t know what you were trying to dig up but now this problem won’t go away. All you had to do was lie, Rachel. I’m not going to get caught up in your mess any more.’

  I grip the door handle. If I’m quick, I could run across the lawn and into the trees, but I know he’s faster than me.

  He reaches over and holds my free hand, pressing my palm into the seat with his meaty fingers.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I say.

  He clears his throat and presses harder. ‘There’s nothing you can do.’ With his other hand he rubs my arm, his movements exaggerated as if they’ve been prepared, and I wonder for whose benefit this little scene is being played. His skin is rough and in the corner of his mouth a nerve twitches.

  Inside the car it’s as freezing as outside, the day’s scant heat streaming into a cloudless sky. A snap of twigs comes from the bushes, an animal probably changing its perch. I look at David and he’s still smiling, as if he’s experiencing pity and kindness at the same time, the same express
ion he uses when he clinches a deal; the generous and caring benefactor, the man who saved me from my student squalor and tolerated my chaos as long as I toed the line: that I satisfied only him and presented well.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ he lets go of my hand and sits up, ‘you’ve finally lost your mind.’ He shakes his head from side to side as he turns to look at me. ‘Alex told me about your little adventures in car parks. Can you imagine how embarrassing that was for me, and for him? I’m in business with the man, I don’t need your personal life wrecking that as well. Good God, Rachel! What were you thinking?’ With one hand he smoothes a strand of his hair that’s flopped forward, and he stares into the distance. ‘I can’t have you in the office any more, and I don’t want you in the house, let alone my bed.’

  Awkwardly he stretches his body across the space between us and presses his mouth hard on mine until it hurts, then he parts his lips and holds my bottom lip with his teeth. He bites. A rush of hot iron in my mouth. I cry out and push him away. My blood’s on his lip also. He spits in disgust.

  ‘We used to be such a great team.’ He wipes his mouth with the dirty tissue. ‘But no one is irreplaceable.’

  With the same tissue, he dabs my face. The paper is tacky.

  ‘When they come looking for you,’ he says, ‘I’ll say you lost it, you upped and went. There’s no reason not to believe me. I haven’t left a trail. Unlike you.’

  He reaches over with both hands and prises my fingers from the watch. I fight back, but he’s stronger than me and he almost gets it but suddenly he stops, as if he can’t be bothered any more.

  ‘Keep it,’ he says. ‘You won’t be needing it where you’re going anyway.’

  And with that he gets out of the car, bending down one last time to peer at me through the open door.

  ‘I’m not jealous, Rachel,’ he says as he picks up my wedding ring from the floor and tucks it in his pocket. ‘Because it’s not love, it never was. You and me, we were just business.’