Let Me Lie

  * * *

  • • •

  When the tea’s made we sit at the island and I show Laura the photographs of the anonymous card. I took them at the police station, not having thought to do so sooner, and the light reflecting off the evidence bags makes the contents hard to read.

  “And that’s all it said?”

  “Just that one line.”

  “Did the police take it seriously?”

  “I think so.” I catch a look in her eyes. “You don’t think they should?”

  “Of course they should! Look at it. Look at you—it must have been really upsetting.” She pauses. “Didn’t you get something like this when your dad died?”

  “That was different. Those people were crazy.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “You think this is sane?”

  I look out the window for the longest while. I think about the searches Dad made on his phone, checking for high tide, for the best place to jump to his death. I think about the chaplain who listened to Mum cry over her husband’s suicide. I think about my parents falling five hundred feet into ice-cold sea. And I wonder if someone pushed them. “I just want answers, Laura.”

  She stares into her tea for a long time before speaking. “Sometimes they’re not the ones we want.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I was ten when Laura’s mum died. I ran to answer the phone, knee-high socks slipping on the hall floor.

  “Can I speak to your mum?”

  “Laura! When are you coming to see us again?” As Mum’s goddaughter, Laura was the big sister I never had. Seven years older, and everything I aspired to be, back when I thought it was important. Cool, fashionable, independent. “I got Star of the Week today, and—”

  “I need your mum, Anna.”

  I’d never heard Laura like that. Serious. Sort of cross, I thought, although I realized afterward she’d simply been trying to hold it all together. I took the phone to Mum.

  My mother’s crying jags were punctuated with bursts of anger. I heard her rail at my dad when I was in bed—supposedly asleep.

  “That bloody flat. Damp in every room. Alicia must have told the council about it a hundred times. She found mushrooms in the bathroom. Mushrooms! Her asthma was bad at school, but . . . Mushrooms, for God’s sake. No wonder it got worse.”

  My dad. Soothing. Too low to hear.

  “I mean, they’ve already said they’ll move Laura into a new build. If that’s not an admission of guilt, I don’t know what is.”

  Only it wasn’t. The housing association strenuously denied any liability. The coroner ruled death by natural causes, Alicia’s asthma an unfortunate contributory factor.

  “You still miss her?” I ask now. It isn’t really a question.

  “Every day.” Laura meets my eyes. “I want to tell you it gets easier, but it doesn’t.”

  I wonder how I’ll feel, sixteen years from now. Surely this jagged, raw pain in my chest won’t still be choking me, all that time later? It has to ease. It has to. The nightmares will fade, along with the fresh sense of loss when I walk into a room and realize my father’s chair is empty. It will get easier. Won’t it?

  I stand up and crouch beside Ella’s bouncy chair. She’s sleeping, but I need to distract myself from the surge of emotion. That’s the key. Distraction. When Alicia died Laura had no one. I have Ella, and I have Mark. Mark, who always knows what to say, always knows how to make me feel better.

  * * *

  • • •

  My parents sent Mark for me. I know that sounds absurd, but I believe people walk into your life at precisely the right moment for you, and Mark is everything I never knew I needed.

  A few days after Mum died I drove to Beachy Head. I had refused to go after Dad’s death, even though my mother spent hours up there, walking the cliff tops, standing at the spot from where he was seen to have jumped.

  When Mum died as well I wanted to see what my parents had seen—wanted to try to understand what had gone through their heads. I parked my car and walked to the edge; looked at the sea as it crashed against the rocks. I felt a dizzying rush of vertigo, coupled with a terrifying, irrational urge to jump. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but right then I felt close to my parents for the first time since their deaths, and I wished I knew unequivocally I would be reunited with my loved ones in heaven. If I knew that, I thought, I wouldn’t hesitate.

  The coroner said my mother’s suicide was understandable—insofar as any death can be understood. She missed my father.

  Dad’s death sent Mum mad. She became nervous and paranoid, jumping at noises and refusing to answer the phone. I’d go downstairs in the middle of the night for a glass of water and find the house empty, my mother out for a walk in the early hours.

  “I went to see your father.” A memorial stone lay in the churchyard, among the other marks of lost lives. I wept to think of her standing alone by his grave.

  “You should have woken me. Wake me, next time.”

  She never did.

  * * *

  • • •

  They’re vigilant at Beachy Head. Particularly on Christmas Eve, less than a week after a copycat suicide has been splashed across the national press. I was still staring at the rocks when the chaplain approached, calm and nonjudgmental.

  “I wasn’t going to jump,” I told him afterward. “I just wanted to know how it must have felt.”

  It wasn’t the same chaplain who had spoken to my mother, up there on the cliff top. This man was older, wiser, than the young chaplain who had come to the police station six days before, shaking in his loafers as he described my mother’s rucksack, heavy with rocks; the way her handbag and mobile phone were placed neatly on the grass, just as my father’s wallet and phone had been seven months previous.

  That chaplain had been close to tears. “She . . . she said she’d changed her mind.” He kept his eyes resolutely turned from mine. “She let me walk her back to the car.”

  But my mother was a stubborn woman. An hour later she’d returned to the cliffs, set her bag and phone once again to one side, and—so the coroner ruled—killed herself.

  The chaplain who spoke to me on Beachy Head last Christmas Eve wasn’t taking any chances. He called the police and waited until they took me gently away, until he could finish his shift knowing no one had died on his watch. I was grateful for his intervention. It scared me to realize we were all a single step from the unthinkable.

  I wasn’t going to jump, I’d told him. But the truth was I couldn’t be sure of that.

  When I got back home there was a leaflet stuffed through the letterbox: Psychotherapy services. Smoking cessation, phobias, confidence. Divorce mediation. Grief counseling. No doubt the whole street had been leafleted, but it felt like a sign, nonetheless. I phoned before I could change my mind.

  I liked Mark instantly. Felt comforted before he’d even spoken. He is tall without being towering, broad-shouldered without being intimidating. His dark eyes have crow’s-feet that hint at wisdom, and when he listens, he is thoughtful, interested; taking off his glasses as though it will help him hear better. I couldn’t have predicted, that first time, that we would end up together. That we’d have a child together. All I knew was that Mark made me feel safe. And he’s made me feel safe ever since.

  Laura finishes her tea and takes her mug to the sink, where she rinses it and puts it upside down on the draining board. “How’s Mark taken to being a dad?”

  I straighten. “He’s obsessed with her. Doesn’t even stop to take his coat off when he gets in from work—he goes straight to Ella and takes over. It’s just as well men can’t breastfeed, or I’d never get a look-in.” I roll my eyes, but of course I’m not complaining. It’s great Mark’s so hands-on. You don’t know what kind of father someone will be, do you? They say we instinctively search out the characteri
stics we need in a mate: honesty, strength, love. But you don’t know whether they’ll go out at three A.M. for the black currant jelly you crave, or do their fair share of the night feeds, and by the time you do it’s too late to back out. I’m lucky to have Mark. Grateful he stuck by us.

  My father never changed a diaper in his life, and as far as I know, Mum never asked him to. It was just the way things were back then. I imagine Dad looking on as Mark burps Ella, or expertly switches a dirty onesie for a clean one, and I know he’d have made some quip about “new men.” I push away the image. Truth is, I don’t know whether Dad would have liked Mark at all.

  It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Mark’s a great dad to Ella, and that’s all that counts.

  * * *

  • • •

  I drank too much, that first date. It took the edge off my nerves and went some way to assuaging the guilt I felt at going out and enjoying myself, less than two months after Mum had died.

  “I’m not normally like this,” I said, when we were back at Mark’s flat in Putney, and the promised cup of coffee had been abandoned in favor of another glass of wine, the tour of the flat ending abruptly in the bedroom. It sounded like a line, but it wasn’t. I’d never slept with anyone on a first date. Or a second or a third. But that night, I felt impetuous. Life was too short not to grab it by the horns.

  In reality I was drunk, not empowered. Reckless, not spontaneous. Mark—perhaps a little less drunk, perhaps still conscious of the fine ethical line we were crossing—attempted to slow things down, but I wouldn’t be swayed.

  The guilt came the following morning. A burning shame that tore through my self-respect and pushed me out of Mark’s bed before he woke.

  He found me by the front door, putting on my boots.

  “You’re leaving? I thought we could go out for breakfast.”

  I hesitated. He didn’t look like a man who’d lost all respect for me, but memories of the night before made me wince. I had a sudden recollection of peeling off my knickers in a low-grade striptease that ended when I lost my balance and toppled onto the bed.

  “I have to go.”

  “I know a great place around the corner. It’s early, still.” The unspoken question—where did I have to be so urgently at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning?—made me say yes.

  By nine my hangover had abated, along with my awkwardness. If Mark wasn’t embarrassed, why should I be? We agreed on one thing, though: it had happened a little faster than either of us had expected.

  “Shall we start again?” Mark suggested. “Last night was fantastic, but . . . maybe we could have another first date. Get to know each other.”

  It was another five weeks before we went to bed again. I didn’t know it then, but I was already pregnant.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Should I take it to the papers?” I ask Laura now.

  “You might be jumping ahead a bit.” She winces at her poor turn of phrase. “Sorry.”

  “They wrote an article when Mum died. They might do a follow-up. Appeal for information.” I picture the card.

  Suicide? Think again.

  “No one came forward at the time, but if Mum was with someone that day—someone who pushed her off the cliff—they must have come across other people.”

  “Anna, the chaplain saw your mum.”

  I fall silent.

  “He talked her back from the edge. She said she wanted to kill herself.”

  I want to put my fingers in my ears. La-la-la-la-la. “He wasn’t there when she actually went over, though, was he? He didn’t see if she was alone when she came back.”

  There’s a pause before Laura speaks. “So, Caroline’s on Beachy Head. She’s ready to jump. The chaplain talks her down. Then, an hour later, someone murders her?”

  She doesn’t have to point out how absurd it sounds.

  “She could have been trying to get away from someone. Thought that killing herself was better than being killed. Only she couldn’t go through with it, and when the chaplain thought he was taking her to safety he was actually delivering her to . . .” I tail off, the pity in Laura’s eyes too much to take.

  “To who?”

  Ella’s awake. She’s making tiny mewing sounds and pushing her bunched fist into her mouth.

  “Who killed her, Anna? Who would have wanted Caroline dead?”

  I chew my bottom lip. “I don’t know—one of those idiots who blame everyone else when their car breaks down?”

  “Like the idiots who sent the anonymous letters after your dad died?”

  “Exactly!” I’m triumphant, thinking she’s proved my point; then I see her face, and somehow, it’s me who’s proved hers. The mews become full-blown wails. I take Ella from her bouncy chair and start to feed her.

  “Look at you—quite the pro now.” Laura smiles.

  In the early days, I could breastfeed only in one particular chair, with a precise arrangement of cushions around me, and no one else in the room to distract Ella from latching on. Nowadays I feed one-handed. Standing up, if I need to.

  I don’t let Laura change the subject. Her question is an important one. Who would have wanted Mum dead? Some of the car dealers my parents and Billy crossed paths with made no attempts to hide their shady practices. Could Mum’s and Dad’s deaths have been the result of a bad business deal?

  “Will you help me go through Mum and Dad’s study?”

  “Now?”

  “Is it a problem? Do you need to go?” If Laura can’t help, I’ll do it on my own. I’m wondering if Mum’s campaigning is the key. When I was in my teens she got involved in protests against animal testing at the University of Brighton, earning herself a smattering of hate mail from employees and their families as a result. I don’t recall her campaigning against anything more contentious than zoning applications and cycle lanes in recent years, but maybe I’ll find something in the study that suggests otherwise.

  “I don’t mean that—I just meant . . . are you sure you want to do it now?”

  “Laura, you’ve spent the best part of a year nagging me to do it!”

  “Only because it’s ludicrous to have been working at the kitchen table when you could have been using that lovely study. And I wasn’t nagging. Although I do think it would have been cathartic, whatever Mark said.”

  I keep my response light. “He does do this sort of thing for a living, you know.”

  “What’s healthy about shutting everything away and pretending it isn’t there?”

  “He didn’t tell me to pretend it wasn’t there, just that I should deal with it when I felt ready.”

  “When he said you were ready?”

  “No. When I felt ready.” Firmer now. I know Laura’s loyalties—like Uncle Billy’s—lie with me, first and foremost, but I wish they were less protective.

  It was too fast; that was the problem. Mark and I haven’t been together even a year, and our baby is eight weeks old. We’re still finding out each other’s favorite foods, movies, books. I’ve met his parents only once. We’re like teenagers, caught out the first time they have sex, except that I’m twenty-six and Mark’s forty.

  That’s part of it, too.

  “He’s old enough to be your father,” Billy said when I’d gotten all the announcements over in one go. I’ve met someone, he’s moving in with me, oh and by the way our baby’s due in October.

  “Barely. And Dad was ten years older than Mum.”

  “And look how that turned out.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  But he wouldn’t be drawn, and I was secretly glad. I didn’t want to know. I’d never wanted to know. When you’re young you think your parents are perfect. Perhaps they shout at you a bit too often, or withhold pocket money till your room’s been tidied, but they’re your parents. They love you
. You love them.

  I was at university when I realized not everyone’s parents were like mine. That not everyone’s mum and dad had screaming rows; not everyone’s mum and dad took daily trips to the bottle bank. The insight was enough—I didn’t want more. I didn’t want to know how my parents’ marriage worked. If it worked at all. It wasn’t my concern.

  * * *

  • • •

  Like the windows in the other ground-floor rooms, the windows in the study are full height, with painted shutters so rarely used they now don’t close. A partners desk in the center of the room meant my parents could work at the same time, although the only time they did so was when they were doing the VAT return, the stress of which invariably caused a row.

  “Anna, ask your father to pass me the stapler,” Mum said one Saturday, when I’d pushed open the door to the study to see if they’d be much longer. I handed her the stapler myself and went out on my bike until it was all over.

  Mostly my parents would take it in turns to stay late at the showroom, until I was old enough to join them at work after school, or to come home on my own.

  My hand on the doorknob, I take a deep breath. I don’t use this room. I don’t go in there. I pretend it doesn’t exist.

  “You don’t have to do this. All the important papers have been gone through.” It’s a generously oblique reference to the long day Laura spent patiently weeding out paperwork from the rest of my parents’ belongings, to then spend another day on the phone on my behalf, changing the name on utility bills and canceling dozens of subscriptions in my parents’ names. My gratitude had been tinged with guilt. Who did this for Laura when Alicia died? I pictured a seventeen-year-old Laura in her newly acquired modern council house, sorting through her mother’s paperwork, and my heart broke.

  “It’s time,” I say.

  I want to know everything about my parents’ lives. Everything I turned a blind eye to; everything I hoped wasn’t true. I need to know it all. Who were my parents’ friends? Who were their enemies?