Lies Like Love (31 page)

1. What were your first impressions of Audrey and Leo? How did these opinions change as the novel progressed?
   
2. Discuss how important Audrey and Leo’s relationship is to the novel. For what reasons are they drawn to one another? Why does Leo fail to act earlier to ‘save’ Audrey? Could their relationship have a future?
   
3. How does Audrey’s relationship with her mother differ from Leo’s relationship with his? How does it differ from Leo’s relationship with Sue? Is the absence of father figures significant?
   
4. Which scene had the biggest impact on you?
   
5. Do you agree with Audrey’s decision to return home in Part Three?
   
6. The Thing features prominently in the novel. How did this affect you as a reader? What did you think the Thing was?
   
7. Audrey and Peter share a special connection as brother and sister, and a lot of Audrey’s decisions are made with Peter in mind. How would Audrey’s story have been different if Peter hadn’t been born?
   
8. The author holds back a lot of information from the reader, making gradual revelations as the narrative develops. What devices does she employ to do this? How did this affect your enjoyment of the story? Were the revelations surprising?
   
9. The relationship between Audrey and her mother is incredibly complex. Imagine yourself in Audrey’s mother’s shoes. Why do you think she acts in the way she does towards Audrey? What drives her and what does she gain from it?
   
10. Did you find it possible to have any sympathy for Audrey’s mother?
    
11. Leo comments that: ‘A paradox is a strange contradiction … Something that’s true and false.’ What do you think is the significance of his remark? How does this relate to the title,
    Lies Like Love
    ?
    
12. How did you feel about the ending of the book? How did it change the way you looked at the rest of the story? What would you have done differently?
    

Read on for an extract from

Black Heart Blue

by Louisa Reid

AVAILABLE NOW

They tried to make me go to my sister’s funeral today. In the end I had to give in. The black dress Hephzibah had worn last year when Granny died hung heavy from my bones and I wore it like armour. She’d always been bigger. Born first, stronger, prettier, the popular twin. I’d been walking in her shadow for sixteen years and I liked its cool darkness; it was a safe place to hide. Now I shivered in the stark January air. It was the first day of the New Year and my sister had been dead for one whole week.

Granny had been kind and we’d looked forward to staying with her like other kids look forward to Christmas. It was a chance to eat chocolate and watch television. A chance to read books until well past bedtime. At Granny’s we were allowed to laugh out loud and play dress up, she even let us try her make-up. Hephzi loved make-up, the more sparkly the better. Granny made sure my sister got a bra when she was twelve and started to show. Sometimes she’d take us to the cinema and we would watch unsuitable films: Disney princesses, cartoons, Harry Potter. She was The Mother’s mother and she loved us. She used to kiss me and tell me I was lovely. Her little love. No one else ever said that. As we got older we visited her less and
less. No need, said The Parents, we could make ourselves useful at their church events instead of lounging about at Granny’s. Years yawned wide with her absence. I know Granny missed us. When she rang up and one of us managed to answer, her voice sounded thin and far away like a paper aeroplane spiralling out of sight. And then she died.

I’ve recorded today as another black day and it’s there, a story inscribed hard on my heart. The tales I keep hidden within are many; if you ever open me up then you’ll read the truth. Look inside, peel back skin and flesh, excavate bone, and there you’ll find a library of pain. Perhaps you will ask me to explain. I am, after all, the curator of this past. But some things are too terrible to tell and those words are buried deep. Those are the words I never even whispered to my sister, those are the words that I daren’t say aloud. I wish they wouldn’t cry in the walls of my room and hunt me down in my dreams.

There’s a scar on my heart for when Granny died and one for the day Hephzi first didn’t want to walk home with me from school. I had to lie to explain away her absence when I arrived back at the vicarage alone; I said she was doing extra maths. This was when we started college in September, four months ago. At college everyone noticed how pretty and sweet and funny my twin was and soon she was being invited to parties and talking to boys. Because I was her sister I didn’t get picked on all that much but I think the other kids laughed at me behind my back. Maybe Hephzibah did too. No one would meet my eyes. Even the teachers found it hard.

But now she’s dead. And it was her funeral today.
The coffin was white. The Mother cried. The Father presided over the ceremony. When the good God-bothering folk of the village asked him how he could bear it, he said he had to, that it was his duty to his daughter. And I stood at the front in Hephzi’s black dress and wondered if she could hear what was going on from inside that wooden box and whether she was lonely and cold too. She would know now, for the first time, what it meant to be really left out. Her school friends clustered at the back of the church crying. He couldn’t forbid them from coming but his frozen gaze made it clear that they weren’t welcome. I stared at the floor and loathed them all. Hypocrites. They didn’t help us while she was alive, why were they here now when it was far too late? When the service was over no one spoke to me and I was left standing on my own, waiting for The Parents to finish being consoled.

Alone felt wrong; anyone could see me now that Hephzi was gone. There is usually a pair of eyes somewhere, flicking over me in fascination and dread. I feel those looks like they’re ants, crawling under my skin. Eventually Auntie Melissa, The Mother’s sister, came over and asked me how I was. They’d come all the way from Scotland and I barely recognized her at first, but she ventured an arm around my shoulders and tried to hold me. When I didn’t answer her concerned murmurs and shrank away from her touch she backed off. I didn’t talk to my aunt because I knew he had his eye on me and I was busy telling Hephzi what they were all doing and listening carefully, hoping that she might answer back.

A week without her has been too long.

But now it’s dark and the day is almost over. I’m supposed to sleep in this room still, with the other empty bed just a few feet away. Hephzi’s bed. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, disturbed by my own screams and the racket coming from the wall, and for a moment I can see the slight hump of her body there, turned away from me, like always, breathing softly.

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2014

Text copyright © Louisa Reid, 2014
‘Medusa’ taken from
Ariel
copyright © the Estate of Sylvia Plath and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

Cover Photography © Silas Manhood

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

ISBN: 978-0-141-34320-4