The Past and Other Lies

The Past and
Other Lies

Maggie Joel

F
ELONY
& M
AYHEM
P
RESS
• N
EW
Y
ORK

AUGUST 1981

O
N THAT FINAL DAY of summer a drowsy wasp beat itself noisily against the French window. Through the open doorway the lawn had begun to turn yellow following five days without rain. The next-door neighbour’s cat had trapped a vole and deposited it on Mrs Denzel’s kitchen lino. And someone had taken a chair from the dining room and placed it in an upstairs bedroom.

At first no one noticed.

In the street beyond, a desperate last-day-of-the-school-holidays game of rounders was in progress. A bald tennis ball bouncing off a rounders bat and rebounding off a stationary datsun sent up a cheer and a scurry of feet. A neighbour two doors up dragged his dustbin out to the kerb. A solitary, faded, red plastic triangle of bunting, left over from the royal wedding, fluttered limply from a lamppost. Gradually the game of rounders petered out.

In an upstairs bedroom that overlooked the now silent street, sixteen-year-old Charlotte Denzel climbed onto a dining-room chair that she had carried up to her bedroom for just that purpose. By balancing awkwardly on tiptoe she could just reach the light fitting around which she tied one end of a grey-and-red-striped school tie. She placed the knotted loop at the other end around her neck.

On the dressing-table stood the pot of shocking-pink nail polish with which she had intended to paint her nails. She had painted only one toenail, the big toe on her right foot, to see what it felt like, to experience the sure, broad stroke of the brush and the smooth, glossy sweep of the varnish the way her elder sister, Jennifer, did it. But her hand had shaken, the brush had jerked and the stroke had swerved, clotting in a lump that ran over onto her cuticle. A drop had splashed onto the carpet.

The pointlessness of painting her toenails, of painting anything, left her stunned.

And now the bedroom was heady with the sickly sweet odour of varnish and, looking down at the small pink jar on the dressing-table, she saw she had forgotten to replace the lid. She gazed down at her tartan-slippered feet, at the padded green velour of the dining-room chair on which she stood, and to the faded paisley carpet below. Their room—hers and Jennifer’s—looked different from up here, smaller, more condensed, as though seen through a fish-eye lens. She wondered what people thought when they were about to do this. She wondered what people thought once they had done it.

She couldn’t think at all. There were no thoughts left.

She braced her knees and prepared to kick the chair away.

Downstairs in the dining room the family ate shepherd’s pie and peas from a packet.
Crossroads
had just come on the television and Mr Denzel was home early from the office. A chair was missing from around the dining table and Mrs Denzel seemed to ponder this as she lifted her fork to her mouth, holding it there, poised, with three squashed peas speared to the prongs.
The chair’s missing—that’s odd
, you could see her thinking, then she popped the fork into her mouth and realised the gravy was still simmering in a pan in the kitchen.

‘Oh, the gravy!’ she said, pushing back her chair and going into the kitchen.

‘Today’s the final day of the school summer holidays in England and Wales,’ announced her youngest, Graham, who had read this fact in dad’s copy of
The Times
earlier in the evening. Graham liked people to know he read
The Times
. Most people in their street read the
Mirror
.

‘Well, the nights are drawing in now,’ warned Grandma Lake with a satisfaction that seemed to suggest the family only had themselves to blame. Grandma Lake was Mrs Denzel’s mother and a recent—though not entirely welcome—addition to the household. She sat now with her hands on the table before her in a rather helpless gesture that seemed to imply she was at the mercy of her family.

No one responded to her observation.

‘Here we are!’ announced Mrs Denzel triumphantly returning with a small white gravy boat cradled in a plaid oven glove. ‘Will someone give Charlotte a call?’

Graham reached wordlessly for the gravy, barely lifting his eyes from his plate, and poured a steady stream over his peas and over the mashed potato that he had carefully scraped free of the mince. He lifted the lip of the gravy boat precisely so that none of the gravy went on the mince. This operation successfully completed, he would have placed the gravy boat straight onto the second-best nylon tablecloth had Mrs Denzel not whipped a table mat beneath it in the nick of time. A single drop of gravy hovered on the lip of the gravy boat, bulged for a moment or two, then slid silently down the curved side of the boat to plop onto the watercoloured print of Derwentwater (a gift from Aunt Caroline, Mrs Denzel’s elder sister). Graham surveyed his be-gravyed plate thoughtfully before starting in on the peas, one at a time. He did not look like someone who was about to get up, go into the hallway and call up the stairs to his sister.

‘So anyway, I told Peter to put it all in a memo and file it somewhere... I mean, what else could I do?’

This was Mr Denzel, seated at his usual position at the head of the table, his back to the open sliding doors that led to the lounge.

There had been a moment’s pause as Mr Denzel opened his mouth to speak, but when it became clear he was going to talk about The Office everyone went back to their dinner.

‘Did you, dear? Well, I expect that was the right thing to do,’ replied Mrs Denzel absent-mindedly as she peered over his head at
Crossroads
.

The adverts had just come on and there was a preview for
Capital Tonight
, the program that followed
Crossroads
, and Mrs Denzel seemed to remember where she was. She frowned at the empty place beside Grandma Lake.

‘Charlotte’s dinner’s getting cold. Jennifer, you go, dear,’ she said to her eldest daughter, who sat opposite Graham. ‘I don’t know where that other chair’s gone,’ she added, looking around as though the missing chair was deliberately hiding itself from her.

So it was Jennifer who put down her unused napkin, pushed back her chair, left her half-eaten dinner and went out into the hallway to call her sister.

It was the final day of the summer holidays. The sun edged in through the French window and across the dining-room floor in a last show of force before succumbing to autumn. Two late starlings that had nested on the fencepost in the back garden flew in and out of their little wooden nesting box and a wary grey squirrel darted across the lawn, paused beneath the clothesline to inspect the remains of the dead vole that Mrs Denzel had tossed into the garden, then skittered off in search of the first fallen acorns. And tomorrow was the first day of the new school year.

‘
Charlottedinner’sgettingcoldl
’

Jennifer stood at the bottom of the staircase, one hand on the banister, her eye straying to the coat-cupboard door which was half open, a muddle of winter coats and boots and umbrellas spilling out as though someone had recently rummaged there. The open coat cupboard and the lack of response from upstairs suddenly caused her to wonder if, in fact, Charlotte was in the house at all.

She hesitated. A memory that she wished not to remember nudged her.

She took the stairs in bounds, two at a time, not out of any particular urgency, just because that was how she usually climbed the stairs.

Upstairs, the evening sunlight bathed the landing in an orange glow. Her parents’ bedroom door was ajar, the bedspread neatly turned up, slippers and dressing-gowns stowed and hung, her dad’s travel alarm clock ticking loudly like a time-bomb. Graham’s bedroom door was closed but you knew that behind the door all was military-style precision. The study, which was now Grandma Lake’s room, faced east onto the street and was now in shadow. The scent of lavender seeped from her room onto the landing.

Jennifer turned to the right, to the room she shared with Charlotte, and as she did she heard a loud thump as though something large had fallen over. The door was closed so she grabbed the door handle and went in, announcing as she went, ‘S’dinner time!’

‘A
ND WHAT HAPPENED next, Jennifer?’

Dr Kim Zaresky leaned forward just a little from her seat on the cream leather sofa, hands folded on her exquisitely bland, charcoal-grey suit, knees close together over soft Italian black leather shoes. She smiled in a way that was at once encouraging and supportive. No one sitting opposite such a smile could fail to be touched by it.

Jennifer Denzel was sitting opposite that smile and she swallowed nervously. She too was neatly dressed, though rather than a suit she wore French Connection jeans and calf-length boots, a sober black jacket over a plain white T-shirt—the sort of look you might see featured in a back issue of
Vogue
at the hairdresser’s and decide, yes, I can do that, and it won’t cost too much. She sat on the edge of an identical leather sofa, her knees similarly pressed together, though her hands twisted over each other, the fingers of one hand squeezing the knuckles of the other.

She was anxious, yes, but she felt strangely encouraged and supported. She took a deep breath.

‘Well. That’s when I found her. Charlotte. Hanging there from the light fitting.’

She paused but Dr Zaresky merely smiled encouragingly.

‘And I—I didn’t know what to do. Well, you don’t, do you?... I think I grabbed her. Grabbed her legs. And I suppose I must have got her down though I don’t really remember how... There was a chair, one of the diningroom chairs—it was green, velour—and the room stank of nail polish... And I thought, well she’s dead. At first. But then she started thrashing about and—’

‘I see,’ said Dr Zaresky.

Between them was a smoked-glass and chrome coffee table, low-slung, on which stood a jug of water, two glasses and a tall crystal vase filled with white lilies. Jennifer squinted in the glare from the powerful lamp that bore down on her from overhead. A bead of moisture pricked her upper lip. Opposite, the dusky pink gloss of Dr Zaresky’s lips shimmered like liquid in a Saharan mirage.

There was something about Zaresky’s face—its length and narrowness, the slightly prominent nose, the hollowness of the cheeks—that was not quite English. If you saw that face sitting opposite you on the tube, you would know instantly that this was not an English face, though you wouldn’t be able to put your finger on why.

Dr Zaresky sat back on the sofa, glanced at her notes and crossed her legs in one fluid movement, and Jennifer realised that her time was almost up. She sat back too, and smiled to indicate that she was perfectly in control, that this had not been an ordeal at all.

Dr Zaresky put her head on one side.

‘Did it come as a great shock, Jennifer? I mean, you obviously had no idea that your sister—’ she paused just long enough to let the impact of her question sink in, ‘might try to kill herself?’

Jennifer sat very still as the words ricocheted inside her head. None of her muscles seemed able to move, except for her jaw, which opened slowly of its own volition though no words came out. There was something bubbling up inside her that seemed certain to erupt at any moment. She realised it was panic.

A second passed. Then another.

Dr Zaresky reached over the table, exposing a cuff of ivory silk shirt, and touched Jennifer’s knee.

‘But you really saved her life, didn’t you, Jennifer?’

Jennifer swallowed the panic. ‘Well, I—’

‘And it’s amazing how much detail you recall from that fateful day...how long ago?’

‘1981. August. The thirty-first. A Monday.’

‘Was it really? Yes, it is truly amazing.’

‘It’s sort of etched, you see. Although, well—I mean, some of it I’m not absolutely certain about... The shepherd’s pie and peas, for instance. I can’t actually remember if that’s what we were eating but it’s the kind of thing we would have eaten—’

‘I’m sure. Well, thank you, Jennifer,’ and Dr Zaresky again laid a hand on Jennifer’s knee, then she removed it and turned away. ‘We’ll be back after this short break for more of “I Saved My Sister’s Life!”.’