Liarholic

by Kingsley Ash

  ‘Yeah I want the change, kid.’

  ‘Okay, Bro-Dad. You’re not stingy at all . . . ’

  ‘You’re a gobby little one.’ I ruffle his hair. He totters off. ‘No, wait for me. I’ll come to the shop with you, bud.’

  ‘No, it’s okay. I’m not a baby. I’m nearly ten.’

  The little shop is only a five-minute walk and the neighbourhood is safe enough. I let him go by himself.

  While I wait for Max, I ring Amy. Leave a message. Then feel fucking stupid and try to rerecord the message. The bloody answering service cuts me off.

  I’m staying away from her, but that doesn’t mean I’m leaving her behind again. It’s time to return the favour Amy offered all those years ago, when we were kids, when she hid with me in the broom cupboard, with open arms, wrapping me in the protection of her sympathy.

  There was nothing I could offer until this moment that comes close to what Amy gave me back then. Nothing that had ever been offered to me in my whole pathetic fucking life and Amy offered it so easily.

  But I fucked it up. Was just too damn hard to love, and Amy was — is more than I deserve. She’s more than I thought I could ever give her in return.

  Now, in this moment, seeing Sad Amy, seeing her heart decay — it just about breaks my fucking soul.

  The reason why I’m back in town has changed.

  Fifteen minutes later, Max returns with a small carton of milk and a packet of Maltesers.

  ‘Don’t remember saying you could buy those, Max.’

  ‘You didn’t say I couldn’t.’

  ‘I said I wanted the change.’

  ‘Here.’ He slams seven pence into my palm. The coins are hot and sticky. ‘Do you want some Maltesers?’

  ‘Yeah. Alright.’

  I push my paperwork to one side. We sit at the table drinking milk and dividing up the Maltesers. Max gets a kitchen knife and cuts his Maltesers into halves, and then into quarters. He sits dissolving them on his tongue, then sticks out his tongue to show me.

  ‘Shepherd?’

  ‘Max?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat your Maltesers?’

  ‘You have them.’

  ‘Okay. Bro-Dad?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Tarek said I live here because I belong in a looney bin.’

  Tarek needs to learn to shut his damn mouth.

  ‘Why’d he say that?’

  ‘Because I saw a dead body.’

  Shit. I’ve gotta handle this right.

  ‘What you saw was disturbing, wasn’t it?’

  Max says nothing.

  ‘Max. You ever feel the need to talk about what you saw, doesn’t matter where or when, we can talk about it, yeah?’

  ‘Is it because of the boner?’

  ‘What’d you mean, Max?’

  ‘Tarek said that if you see a grown-up’s willy and it’s a boner then all the other grown-ups go spectrum, and you have to go to see a psycho.’

  I sit, trying to find an answer to this. Tarek’s covered a lot of damn angles in one sentence. I’m caught off guard.

  ‘So, do I have to see a psycho?’

  ‘Psychologist, and I don’t know, mate . . . Yeah, maybe it’ll be a good idea.’

  Max rolls his eyes in that way only nine-year-old’s do.

  ‘Listen up, kid. In the next few years you’re gonna be discovering a lot about your body. And about other people’s bodies. Your mum probably wants to make sure you don’t find that scary.’

  Or go ‘spectrum’ in Tarek’s words.

  His mum enters the kitchen, gives him a hug.

  ‘Thanks for the Maltesers,’ Max says. He takes his mother’s hand. He turns and looks up at me. ‘Can’t you help me? You’re one of those doctor lots, aren’t you?’

  Max smiles at me like I’m a decent person and I want to tell him the truth. Real bad, like it’s burning in my throat, the words.

  ‘No, Max, not me.’

  When night hits, I lie on my back in bed. My bedroom no longer smells of sex and sweat, but I sniff Amy’s white lace panties, the ones she’s forgotten, thinking that somehow, Amy is here with me, and we have something we can never fucking have.

  US.

  Fuck. It all seems fucked. We have no damn chance in my world.

  There’s only one way I can end this.

  Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

  Sorry, Amy.

  27

  ME

  When the car lights strobe through my living room blinds, I check myself out in the mirror. I look like the Walking Dead. Dirty, two-day old torn jeans. Stained white tee.

  In the bathroom, the shower hisses. It's almost time now. I sit down on the sofa and rub my eyes. I haven’t slept in months.

  Amy’s made me take stock of life. Made me see through the shit in the trees. It’s a strange feeling, like I’ve been abducted to another planet with no getaway ship.

  It’s become an obsession — hell, addiction. Crazy addiction. Like I’ve injected my brain with heroin.

  My heroine.

  After I slept with Amy, it started. I know too much. I can’t stop seeing Amy in my head, slowly spinning away like a ballerina in a half-life musical box.

  It. Is. Driving. Me. Mad.

  I can’t sleep or work or function.

  To make it stop, I’ve brought Portia Sinclair up to my room.

  I know Amy is sat in her room, lost and alone. I know she heard us raising a ruckus up the stairs.

  I know I’m a fucking arsehole who deserves to die.

  This is me trying to put things back the way they were before.

  Portia thinks I’ve got it rock-hard for her because I inked her forearm with my words tonight, my poetry. Portia wanted a tacky rose. Cliché and drab ain’t my thing. I gave her real art. Something real. I inked her with words I wrote while thinking of Amy.

  ‘Forever you will burn with me’.

  Inking Portia didn’t rid this bitter sting in my soul. Instead, it’s made everything a little more darker.

  In the bathroom, Portia is humming. Some fuckwit mainstream pop tune. I hate it. I hate dull.

  I fucking hate me.

  Amy isn’t dull. Amy is all the colours in the rainbow. Amy makes me feel like a man on fire.

  Hell, when did this happen? It’s like finding a deep cut on your body with no memory of it happening. I need my head examined. I think of the time I went skateboarding by the docks and cracked my skull.

  I rub the back of my neck. It’s too hot in the room to breathe. The sky is yellow and smells of sulphur. I hear the squeaking of the shower knobs. The pipes in the walls groan and stutter like a train is passing. I ball up my hands and flex them tight, knuckles popping. The bathroom door opens. Portia steps out, wreathed in ghosts of steam.

  I brought Portia here to take back what Amy stole from me.

  My dead heart.

  I’m not for her.

  Portia puts her hands on her hips and cocks them this way, then that. With her finger, she wipes away a smear of red lipstick from the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Let’s go into your bedroom,’ she says.

  ‘No.’

  My bedroom is off limits.

  ‘Fine. Turn the lights on, babe,’ she says.

  I click the lamp by the sofa. Piss-yellow light illuminates the room. A fly lies half-dead in the middle of my rug.

  Portia says, ‘What do you want me to be? Do you want me to be that girl I saw you with? The one wearing your jacket. The one you used. You know, to make me jealous? Princess dresses and cardigans, it’s not my style but whatever.’

  ‘No,’ I grumble.

  I’ve been drinking all night and I’m way off my rocker. The reason why I don’t fucking remember mentioning Amy to Portia.

  ‘Oh, I get it. Do you want to punish me? Do you want a bad, bad girl?’

  She is the furthest I can get from Amy. That’s what I want.

  I look at Portia in all her tacky underwear and I
feel nothing. Not even disgust. I’m numb to all of her.

  All I feel is Amy.

  Amy. Fucking, Amy.

  Amy is like goddamn Goldilocks. The girl who trespassed into my everything. Took over everything, consumed everything I own. The girl who stole my mind, my soul, and my heart — if I ever fucking had one.

  The only girl who could bring the King of Rats crashing to his knees.

  When you’re an addict, like me, addicted to lying, you can go without feeling anything except power or exploitation or the feeling of getting off on the high on manipulating people to your whim. Until Amy came along. She puts me on trial against all the lies I’ve told. I’m the hangman and the rope is in her hands.

  I glance down at the decaying fly again.

  Just what’re you trying to prove here, Shepherd?

  That I’m an unfeeling jerk. That I really don’t care.

  I look at Portia.

  What would a monster DO?

  The fuck you doing, Shepherd?

  I can feel something odd warp inside my guts. Cracking, and crinkling, and seeping into my chest. Like the ice around my frozen heart is thawing, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.

  Portia’s breath is hot on my face. Her fingers clutch into my shirt, twisting it in a way that makes me angry. It isn’t hers to touch! I grab her wrist and feel the bones in her hand creak under my grip.

  ‘This ain’t happening,’ I rasp and whirl up from the sofa like a hurricane. ‘It was a mistake bringing you here.’

  There’s only one girl I want touching me. But she’s living in the Land of Nowhere. A place with magical rainbows and unicorns and shit — that don’t fucking exist.

  My cold hard reality is existing in Hell, with a girl who makes my dick limp.

  Portia reminds me of an ice queen with her smirk. ‘You brought me to this madhouse for a reason, Shepherd.’

  I’ll never sleep with another girl — goddamn never. That’s a promise I’ll take to the grave.

  ‘It means nothing. Just means I’m tanked up and nothing else.’

  Her smirk dies. She laughs viciously. ‘It’s that virgin Mary, isn’t it?’

  ‘What? No,’ I spit.

  ‘Then what? Are you gay?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m gay.’

  I don’t care if this girl, or every girl in the damn world believes I bat for the other team. They can never give me what I want. Need. Desire. Burn for.

  Just Amy.

  I ask Portia, ‘Got Henry’s number for me?’

  I laugh.

  Portia doesn’t.

  I tell her to get dressed in the bathroom while I call her a taxi.

  ‘You’ll come back running, Shepherd. Men like you aren’t meant for girls like her,’ she says, then storms out.

  I decide I am truly away with the twisted. Because all that dark chaos inside my head is clear-cut now. All those broken sharp pieces cutting up my line of thinking, are finally taking shape.

  This stranger-thing feeling that has been feeding away at my guts, it’s hit me like a ton of bricks.

  I am madly, crazy, sadistically in love with Amy Earhart.

  Always have been. Always will.

  I spend the whole night outside, dipping my feet in Devil’s Thirst.

  It’s taking all my energy to not let these feelings smother me and grow, like poison ivy in my damned, soulless heart.

  28

  YOU

  LAST NIGHT, I CRIED myself to sleep.

  Shepherd had a girl in his room.

  Oblivion. I feel it, the darkness, that place beyond all feeling.

  I saw her. I looked out the window when she left. It was the girl from The Wicked Witch.

  Why did it have to be her? She is the opposite of me. Stunning, stylish, confident.

  It feels like dying.

  I put on a brave face when I go into Scarlett’s room. The girls are all here, and it seems light-hearted enough.

  Lilac takes Scarlett’s pink Jackie O sunglasses and puts them on, walking around like a supermodel. Annabeth starts to sing, a song playing on the radio in the staff room, nearby. This girl is on fire. They grab each other, singing louder, and start bouncing on the bed. Scarlett grabs a pillow and starts whacking them on the legs, belting out the chorus along with Alicia Keyes. Even Daisy joins in, not singing, but clapping her hands lightly to the song.

  Giggling, clasping each other, they land in a heap. I’m laughing too. This is a good moment.

  Next to me, Scarlett’s patent handbag bulges open with a magazine, and a can of Diet Coke. Under it, I spy a little penknife and wonder if she’s self-harming again. Scarlett grew up with a strict, over-bearing mother who’s belittled her since she was a child.

  Daisy remains in the corner, slightly more relaxed than usual, until Annabeth and Lilac turn their attention to her, and begin to ask her questions about her uncle. They want to hear her story again. It’s like a horror film for them. They forget it’s real.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ I tell them, and they look defensive but they stop. Daisy gives me the smallest smile.

  Scarlett plops down next to me on the sofa, opens her can of Diet Coke and offers me a swig. I shake my head. I watch her knock back the can, then re-apply her candy-pink lip gloss.

  ‘So, Amy, what’s occurring with you and Dr Sexpire?’ Scarlett says.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘He’s such a dork,’ she says. ‘Why’s he taken such an interest in you? Come on, spill the goss.’

  ‘Nothing is going on between us.’

  ‘Didn’t think so. I heard he had a girl here last night. Not jealous, are you?’ Scarlett smirks and it makes her ugly.

  I don’t say anything. It frustrates her. Always does when I’m quiet. I’ve never opened up to any of them. Not even in group therapy.

  ‘Lilac said you’d have to talk one day, but not to us.’

  Lilac looks like she wants the ground to swallow her up. Her face is crimson. ‘I only meant you’d rather talk to a professional than us,’ Lilac says.

  ‘But that’s not what you said, Lilac,’ crows Scarlett loudly. ‘You said Amy will only talk to someone who’s very highly qualified because she thinks she’s special. Because she thinks that her story is more tragic than ours.’

  I know she’s just lashing out because she’s upset I won’t open up to her, but it’s a low punch.

  I gaze up at the ceiling, and try not to think. But I know now that this thing between Shepherd and me, it hasn’t escaped the slow erosion of everything, and that even when you think you’ve lost it all, there is still more that can be taken from you.

  THE NEXT DAY, Scarlett comes to my room, her face flushed with guilt.

  ‘What you doing after lunch?’ she says.

  So this is how we’ll play it. No acknowledgement of what a bitch she was yesterday, but she’ll try to make it up to me. I decide to let her. She’s in all kinds of pain, too. We need each other.

  ‘Catching a flight to Paris,’ I say. ‘Thought I’d start with the Louvre, but I’m skipping the Eiffel Tower. Too touristy.’

  She grins, glad I’m playing along and that I’m not going to punish her. She raises one over-plucked eyebrow, a look she must have practised in the mirror.

  ‘What about going back to my room and I’ll give you a makeover? I could trim your hair for you, give you a total new look. Pretty Virgin Librarian is so last decade.’

  ‘You’re not touching my hair, Scarlett.’

  She sighs at me, shaking her head. ‘You could be a model if you just made an effort. Why d’you always cover yourself up? It’s like you don’t want anyone to notice how beautiful you are.’

  29

  YOU

  IN THE LAST WEEK, Shepherd has been a ghost in the estate. I haven’t glanced a peek at chiselled cheekbones or the jawline proud like a Roman statue. Sometimes I hear noises from upstairs, a soft footfall, a cupboard door, the noise of bathwater draining away. But more often, there is no noise at a
ll.

  No girl’s voice or giggles . . .

  When I get back from group therapy, there’s something white by my room door. It’s a large envelope with just the word ‘Amy’ on the front in black marker.

  I leave the envelope where it is and check my door, twice over, start to finish. I pick it up and take it inside my room. I drop it on the table while I do the checks. I rush through the first two times because I want to see what’s in the envelope. When I finish, I pause. Is that good enough? Should I do it again, just to be sure? Maybe I missed something.

  I start again.

  It’s nearly nine when I sit on the sofa and open the envelope. A pile of papers. Some of them are clipped together with a paperclip. A handwritten note at the front.

  Amy—

  You need to read these. Just do it.

  — Shepherd

  I look at the note until my eyes burn from not blinking. The way he’s written my name, the way he’s signed his name. I wonder if he had to think about what to write. It looks utterly carefree, easy. As though he picked up the pile of papers somewhere, casually, and then just scribbled off a few lines without even thinking about it.

  I go through the pile. I notice there’s nothing careless about it. There are articles he’s printed off various websites, with bits underlined. Under that, three chapters from a book called Unstuck, with bits highlighted in green.

  Unexpectedly, the last page is another handwritten note.

  Amy—

  Dig deep, find the grit in you.

  — Shepherd

  Then his phone number again. Just in case I lost the last one he gave me. Which of course I haven’t. I know exactly where that bit of card is. Just in case I need it. Which I never will. I know his number off by heart already.

  Not that I’m going to use it.

  My mind drifts to yesterday’s hurts. Her cackling laughter. Her keen footsteps passing my room.

  Him inside her.

  I get up from the sofa, look down at the sheets of information in my hand, then chuck them into the rubbish bin.

  I check that the steel lock I put on my heart is still closed, the key lost long ago. I squeeze the chains wrapped around my heart tighter, until it hurts.