Little White Lies

by Philippa East

  From her first words, Ms Coulson sounded confused. I interrupted, trying again to explain myself. I spoke in a rush, my words tripping over each other and my explanation coming out garbled. I took a breath and went back to the beginning. I tried this time to articulate our situation slowly, sanely, point by point. Had Abigail mentioned any of this in Thursday’s session? Was there anything Jenny thought that would help?

  When I finished there was a silence. Then Ms Coulson replied: ‘But Mrs White – I haven’t seen your daughter since July.’

  I felt myself go very still.

  ‘Since July?’ said Robert.

  ‘I have your letter here in her file …’

  ‘What letter?’ I managed to say. Her words were entering the room like a detonation.

  ‘The letter from you, Mrs White. You wrote she was doing much better and you felt she could stop seeing me.’

  ‘I didn’t write anything like that.’

  The therapist paused, then said: ‘It has your signature – same as on your payment cheques. Abigail said there was no need for me to call you. I’m so sorry, Mrs White, if there’s been some mistake—’

  I was shaking. I hung up. I opened my laptop, my hands slipping on the keys. I logged into our bank account and scrolled through the weeks, back, back, back and it was true. Since July, there was nothing: no cheques cashed.

  ‘Robert,’ I said once I trusted myself to speak, ‘can you please call Abigail down?’

  When she came down the stairs her face was closed off in a way that was worse than I’d ever seen before. The bandage across her forehead was frayed at the sides as though she’d been trying to tear it off. I thought we had talked and made it okay, but one look at her and I knew I’d been so, so wrong.

  ‘Can you sit down?’ I said. ‘Here, on the couch.’ I thought of that very first night when she came home, when I’d dropped the vase of roses and the carpet got soaked with spilled water, and who was to say there weren’t slivers of glass still embedded in the weave?

  Abigail lowered herself stiffly onto the cushions. We sat flanking her, one on either side. She looked at her knees – her very bony knees – and I wished I was close enough to take Robert’s hand. I started off as carefully as I could. I started off with: ‘We are only trying to understand.’

  I tried to keep my shoulders down, my body language open. I asked her: all that time, where had she been going? Where had she spent the hour if not in Ms Coulson’s room?

  ‘I walked around,’ she said. ‘Just walked around.’

  ‘Wandered the streets?’ The very thought of it filled my stomach with dread. I imagined her going to the bridge, the railway line.

  ‘Didn’t you think you could discuss it with us?’ Robert asked. ‘If you didn’t want to go anymore, that’s all right, but we have to know what’s going on.’

  It felt inconceivable that Abigail had not told us, that she had lied and hidden the lie, that she had forged a letter from us and faked our signatures, and pretended every Thursday to go. And it was inconceivable that we had not known.

  And now another thought burrowed into my mind. ‘What about all those cheques we gave you? What happened to them, where are they?’

  Abigail said: ‘I tore them up.’

  I saw her scattering them away in the wind as she walked. I saw her again the night of her birthday, the red dress flying out around her, haring up the street away from us. When had she veered onto this trajectory, falling so far from sense and normality? Abigail was pressing herself back into the couch, her neck rigid. My voice grew louder, despite my best efforts. ‘But Abigail, why?’

  And Robert: ‘Please, Abigail, you have to communicate with us.’

  I hardly knew what Robert or I said next and Abigail just seemed to be mumbling to herself. When I caught the words I could hardly breathe; her lips shaped that awful phrase again: Stop pretending.

  I could see Robert was on the edge; my husband who was always so careful and controlled now near to losing it in a panic of concern. I held up a hand – wait, stop a moment – but by now we had already gone too far. We had pushed her, we had scolded her, we hadn’t been on her side. In a split-second Abigail’s mumble became a shout, a confused hubbub, and it can only have been a few seconds – half a minute at most – but it felt like hours that Abigail sat there and screamed at us, with all kinds of accusations tangled up in there.

  Then she wrenched herself up from the couch, flew up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door – three, four, five times – so hard that I felt our very house would come apart.

  Chapter 30

  Sunday 22nd September:

  Day 119

  JESS

  But the day after, despite everything that I knew had happened, Abigail seemed so calm. That Sunday morning, I went round to see her, to help her pack for the trial and tell her what my parents had said. But she hardly seemed bothered by any of it any more. Like, why was I even mentioning it? Sleep-talking and a crazy row, but now all that had been like nothing, gone away somewhere or never even existed. Maybe, said Uncle Robert, as he gave me a lift back home, she had just needed to get something out of her system. Maybe all that shouting had done her some good.

  The more I thought about it, the more right he seemed. Abigail had done all of that shouting and now, the day before the trial, in her calmness she was almost serene.

  Chapter 31

  Sunday 22nd September:

  Day 119

  ANNE

  All that remained was to get through the trial.

  Abigail had had hours of preparation – with the lawyers, with Caroline from the Witness Service. We had her outfit – the one we had shopped for together; it was ironed, folded and neatly packed. We had made arrangements for the twins to stay with their best friend’s family. If the Bradys’ were going to join us at trial, we couldn’t leave the twins with them. I sent another text to Jack’s mum, checking yet again that the plans were okay. A reply came back almost at once. Yes. Of course. And good luck for the trial.

  Robert and the children were upstairs packing. I was downstairs, searching for our train tickets. I checked my watch. We needed to hurry: our train was leaving in less than an hour and we still needed to drop the twins off on the way.

  I shuffled through another pile of documents on the kitchen surface – the tickets weren’t there either, though a bank statement was, a council letter about recycling and a scribbled drawing by Laurie in black and red.

  ‘Have you found them?’ Robert called down.

  ‘Not yet,’ I shouted back. A sheaf of papers tipped onto the floor and I crouched down to scoop them up. Amongst the scattered pages, I glimpsed a school report of Sam’s, half read, but no tickets. Where were they? I remembered booking them, clear as day, three tickets, open return, because who knew how long it would last or when we would be able to come home? I remembered the confirmation email and I remembered—

  Wait. I went to the foot of the stairs. ‘Robert? Is the printer set up?’

  ‘In the living room. Just plug in the cable.’

  I opened my laptop on the arm of the couch, by the little table where the printer now sat. Robert had moved it there from Abigail’s room. I opened my email: here they were. Three tickets. I plugged in the cable and set the printer running.

  ‘Mummy!’ A wail from upstairs. ‘Mumm-e-e-e!’

  ‘Have you got toothpaste?’ I shouted up to Robert. ‘We always forget toothpaste.’

  The tickets came out sharp and glossy, the new ink shining. For a moment I stared at them, my breath catching. We were ready now, we had everything we needed.

  Upstairs, in our bedroom, Robert was zipping up our suitcase. ‘Everything okay?’

  I held out the tickets: three adult bookings. Since her birthday, she no longer qualified as a child. We went through the rest of our checklist together. Nothing forgotten, nothing missed. We had the toothpaste, we had our tickets, no way to put it off and no way to back out now. Robert put his arms out and hu
gged me.

  ‘All right then,’ he said. ‘Time to go.’

  In her room, Abigail was standing by her bed with her suitcase, like a soldier waiting to go on parade.

  ‘Ready?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘Give that here then,’ said Robert, beside me. ‘I’ll take it down to the car.’

  Any moment now, we would leave.

  She had been so calm since the strangeness of last night, but then Jess had been round and Jess always helped. Abigail had been so calm, in fact, that I’d easily agreed to what Lillian asked for: we would let Abigail come into the courtroom for the verdict. She would remain outside for the rest of the trial; I couldn’t bear the idea of her being with him for days in the courtroom, the danger of the twisted bond between them. But I could understand how it might help to be there at the end: to see him found guilty, get closure. I didn’t want to argue with Lillian now. No distractions, no conflict. Nothing mattered except getting through this process, the final test we had to face.

  I took a last look around her room, as Robert lumbered downstairs with our suitcases. Her room was neat and tidy, the way she always kept it. Everything in its place, and the only thing that seemed to be missing was the little blue rabbit, her favourite, her flopsy. What had she done with it? She had packed it perhaps. In the mirror of her vanity, I could see her side-on reflection: nose, eyes, hairline. The angles made me notice something I seemed to have gone blind to. Gently, I tapped a finger to my forehead. ‘You don’t need that on any more, do you? It’s healed now, hasn’t it? You can take it off.’

  When she reached up to lift the edge, the plaster peeled away easily enough.

  ‘Mum-ee-ee!’ Laurie’s voice floated again across the hallway.

  ‘What is it? Just a minute,’ I said to Abigail. ‘Just a minute, then we’ll go.’

  But in the boys’ room, Laurie’s suitcase lay open on his bunk and his clothes were all over the floor.

  ‘What are you doing? You need to get ready.’

  ‘I’m packed,’ said Sam.

  ‘Sam says I can’t go!’ cried Laurie.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I began to put his clothes back into the case, half folding them, half shoving them in. It only made him cry harder.

  ‘With Abigail. He says I can’t go.’

  ‘Laurie! Come on. We’ve talked about this. We’ve been over this for weeks. You and Sam are staying with Jack.’ The suitcase was a flimsy, Harry Potter thing and the zip buckled as I tried to fasten it. Abigail slipped into the room like a shadow, leaning her back against the wall by the door.

  ‘But I want to go with Abigail!’

  ‘Shut up,’ Sam said. ‘I told you, you can’t.’

  Laurie’s face was distorted with grief. ‘Why?’

  Sam yelled. ‘Because babies aren’t allowed!’

  The zip unsnagged, biting my finger. ‘Sam, Laurie, please. We have to leave!’

  I was so busy with the suitcase, yanking the zip round, that I didn’t see what happened next. It was Abigail who was watching everything from the doorway. One moment, Sam was shouting and Laurie was crying, and the next there was the flash of an arm swinging, a shrieking scream from Laurie, and when I looked up he was holding his hands to his neck and Sam was tumbling to the floor.

  ‘Oh my God, Laurie! What are you doing?’

  Sam knelt on the floor with his hands to his face. There were red scratches on Laurie’s neck and the collar of his pale blue T-shirt was torn. I didn’t even know who to go to first. What was this? The boys – my boys – they almost never fought, but a whirl of images came back to me now: Sam raising a fist, Laurie shoving, kicking, crying in the night.

  Before I could move, Abigail peeled herself from the wall and crouched down next to them. I’d been wrong. Yet again, I’d been wrong. The mark on her head was red and angry – not healed up at all. She raised Sam to his feet and straightened Laurie’s T-shirt. It was the first time I’d seen her touch them like that.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she was saying to them, ‘I promise. You have to stay here and be looked after. You’re going to stay away from it, and be safe.’

  I let go of the suitcase and found my voice. ‘What is it? My sweethearts, what is it?’ Laurie wiped his eyes, Sam lowered his hands. His cheek was fine; both of them were fine. The whole thing had looked so much worse than it was. But they still stared at me, wordless; they couldn’t tell me. It was as though they had sensed some shadow that none of us had grasped, channelled some current that hung over our whole family. I pulled a wad of tissue from my sleeve, wet it and dabbed the skin under Laurie’s chin. I kissed Sam’s cheek, soothing the bruise.

  I heard Robert beep the horn from outside. I looked at the trio of my children standing there – innocent, bruised – and felt weak with unease. I thought of how Abigail had screamed at us yesterday, bizarre, incomprehensible words we couldn’t make sense of, about photographs, betrayals, a terrifying muddle of anger and hurt.

  Something is bothering me. The detective’s words buzzed through my head, a memory of him staring at us as he played Cassingham’s tape. Something still isn’t adding up.

  A thought burst open in me, a tight shoot wrapping its tendrils around me. For the first time I thought: what if DS McCarthy was right all along?

  Chapter 32

  Wednesday 25th September:

  Day 122

  JESS

  The courtroom was cold. That’s what I was aware of most, at first. How all of us huddled in the gallery.

  The trial had already run for two days, and now finally I had persuaded Mum and Dad to take me down. We have to be there, I’d told them. Abigail would want me there. And I was old enough to be in the courtroom. Fifteen, almost sixteen, the rules said I was allowed, and Dad was able to persuade Mum now. I had been waiting and waiting, and now finally we were here, in the middle of the trial itself.

  The public gallery was almost full: I counted fourteen men and twenty-one women. Not long now, Uncle Robert had said; they could move to deliberation any day. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Abigail had asked me, what she’d said. When they read out the verdict, I want to be there. I have to get through all these lies. I had agreed, thought I’d understood her plan, but what if there was so much more to it than that?

  I sat in the gallery, scanning the courtroom. What had I been expecting? For a monster to look monstrous, like some ogre in a fairy tale? Each time, my gaze passed over him, juddering away. I only made the connection with reality when I looked for the cues of the courtroom itself – the features I’d repeatedly Googled before coming. Those were the jurors, and the bench for the judge; there was the witness stand, and there was the dock, and this man was in it. This man. I’d seen his picture all over the news and Uncle Robert had described him when he’d returned from that first hearing – his hair, his height, his shape. But when I finally did set eyes on him it caught me so off-guard. He was so ordinary. That pale blond hair hanging over his ears. I thought of the boy I’d seen in the blurred Internet print-out. In the street I would have walked straight past him. I couldn’t have singled him out in a crowd. If he had come up to me helpfully in the rain, I don’t think I’d have been frightened. The idea sent a shiver down my spine.

  I tried to make myself listen to what was going on. I was doing this for Abigail, I had to make myself hear it all. The prosecution called a last witness and a man climbed, light-footed, up to the stand. He settled himself, ready for questions. Ready to tell the truth and nothing but. He was a police officer, there to talk about the evidence they’d found in the house. Abigail had lived there all right, he said. There were the clothes, the DNA on the bed sheets. Packets of sanitary pads under the attic bed. They’d found plates, dishes, knives and forks. Bags of sweets and their empty wrappers. An ashtray. Storybooks and textbooks, paper and crayons. A lack of windows, a lack of light. A heavy lock on the attic trapdoor and a ladder too weighty for a young girl to unfold. Unconsciously, I kept reaching acr
oss myself into the space at my side. Reaching for Abigail, but she wasn’t there; she was with Uncle Robert, back at the hotel, safely kept away from it all. I felt her absence like a hollow pit, one I was in danger of tumbling right into.

  While the police officer spoke, the jury were blank-faced. I couldn’t read anything in their expressions. Not the man with the frown lines between his eyes nor the woman with glasses that caught the light, not the elderly man who scratched his stubble, nor the young woman who caught a cough in her fist. And then the defence barrister was standing up. His chin was wide and broad, like a hammer, and his eyes looked like they could see right through anyone. He was so tall, he towered, and his questions were like darts, so sharp you hardly even felt them go in. As I watched and listened, I kept losing my footing. My hand-holds kept slipping out from under me. Again and again he did it – just when I had been so clear, so sure, the very next step I was stumbling, tumbling under his words. This defence barrister presented the very same facts, but he’d wrenched them inside out, turned them upside down. He made us look, then look again, questioning everything we’d just been told. Are you sure, every one of his questions said, are you really sure? Locks for imprisonment, the attic a cage. Or could the locks be for safety, for a child’s own good? The traces of blood in the kitchen? Take a nosebleed, for example, or perhaps a grazed knee. Who of us hasn’t made for the kitchen sink to catch the drips? What child has never hurt themselves?

  Next to me, Dad laid a hand on my arm. ‘Saying these things,’ he murmured, ‘it’s only his job.’ I knew that, but I still felt the muscles in my legs grow weak. We were supposed to come here and see the bad man punished. This was supposed to lay it all to rest, so that Abigail would never be frightened again. All this time I’d thought it so simple. Right and wrong, good and bad. Plain as daylight. That’s what I had always believed. Now I was learning, in the very place where it mattered most, maybe it wasn’t like that at all.