The Past and Other Lies (2 page)

Dr Zaresky’s encouraging and supportive smile faded to be replaced by an advertisement for a ladies’ shaver and the sound went mute.

‘
But that’s not true!
’

Charlotte Denzel stood in the centre of her tiny, cluttered office on the eighth floor of the F.R. Moffatt Building and brandished the remote control at the television screen.

‘IT. ISN’T. TRUE,’ she repeated, clutching the remote so tightly the black plastic battery cover spun off the back and two duracell batteries spilled onto the floor with a clatter. She turned to face the only other person in the small office—willing him to believe her.

Dave Glengorran, who was that other person, stared dumbly at the television, clearly unconcerned by such things as truth and lies.

‘That your sister?’ he said, even though Jennifer had been replaced on the screen by a suntanned young woman who was perched on the edge of a bath, a huge white towel wrapped around her, slowly and luxuriously drawing a razor blade through the soap suds on her shin. Dave moved closer to the television as though he might discover Jennifer hiding behind the shaving woman.

The television, a sixteen-inch portable, was perched precariously on top of a 1960s filing cabinet in their shared office—‘office’ being the somewhat optimistic description for what was essentially a cubicle wedged awkwardly between the dead-photocopier repository and the women’s toilets, a space that seeped an acidic blend of stale urine, bleach and the decaying innards of superseded photocopying equipment. It was located on the upper levels of the building which housed the whole of the Faculty of Humanities and itself occupied a prominent position on the main campus of Edinburgh’s Waverley University.

On the TV screen the woman in the bathrobe had been replaced by a smiling teenage girl brandishing a gaily coloured pack of tampons.

‘Is it? Your sister?’ repeated Dave. ‘She married? Seeing anyone?’

Dave, who was in his early forties, wore a tan-coloured leather jacket, smoked Marlboros and had an easy ‘always a spare bed at my place if you want it,
nudge-nudge-wink-wink
’ kind of attitude that was undermined by trousers that were a little too high at the waist and ankle to be entirely credible. He had the aura of one who, at heart, was still an undergraduate.

Charlotte saw him through a steadily growing haze of dismay and shock. Her throat seemed to be tightening, constricting. She thought of words like ‘anaphylactic shock’. But that was caused by allergic reactions to certain foods and bee-stings—not by daytime television. Dave’s words seemed to add to the haze.

‘No, Dave. She’s not married. She’s divorced. And that’s her sister-in-law. Her
ex
sister-in-law.’

‘Who?’ Dave looked baffled.

‘
Kim
. Dr Zaresky. That’s the only reason my sister’s on the program, because she was married to Kim’s brother.’

‘Oh, right... Really?’

Dave turned back to the television where the teenage girl smiled implacably in a way that seemed to imply that, for her, a gaily coloured tampon pack was everything.

Charlotte found that her fingers were still clenched tightly around the black box of the remote control and aimed at the small television screen. She let her arm drop to her side, feeling a throbbing at her temples.

‘She’s fuckin’ gorgeous,’ said Dave, his Scottish
r
rolling even more than usual. ‘Do you know her, then?’

The throbbing intensified.

‘Of course I
know
her! She’s my
sister
.’

‘No, the other one, the doctor.’

Charlotte sat down on her desk, pushing aside her untouched lunch and a mountain of unmarked first-year semiotics essays. Dave reached out and deftly caught the pile of essays as it began to topple over.

‘Your lot still doing
Buffy
?’ he observed, momentarily distracted as he glanced at the title page of the top essay: ‘The Place of “Good” and “Evil” in a Post-Dichotomous World in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
’.

Charlotte took the essay from him and wordlessly replaced it on the top of the pile. Dave had once taught an entire semester on Britney Spears—Britney as postfeminist icon, the death of individualism in a post-Britney world, Britney as post-icon icon—so he was hardly in a position to criticise. Besides, the undergraduates always wanted to write about
Buffy
and
Angel
, it was a fact of cultural studies life. The days of
Bladerunner
were long gone.

She took a deep breath. There was not enough room in this office. It was increasingly difficult to find space to breathe.

‘So all that stuff your sister talked about,’ said Dave, nodding at the television. ‘You’re saying it didn’t really happen?’

Charlotte
had
said that. At the time it had seemed like a reasonable thing to say. A face-saving thing to say. Now she was stuck with it.

‘It was pretty believable, though, wasn’t it?’ Dave continued. ‘All that detail. I mean, she was pretty convincing.’

Which was tantamount to him calling Charlotte a liar.

‘Of course it was
convincing
. Of course it was
detailed
. Of course it was
believable
. That’s because it’s a true story—but it was
her
, not me!’

Charlotte turned away and began to sort the chaotic pile of essays on her desk. If she was going to tell a lie she might as well make it a big one.

‘Aye, well. Folks always believe what they see on the telly.’

‘No, Dave, they don’t.’ She could feel a lecture coming on and she did nothing to stop it. ‘In our technology-saturated society, the average viewer is bombarded with such a volume of conflicting televisual and media images that they’ve learned to question the validity of those images. Cultural Studies 101, Dave.
Your
course.’

‘Aye, well,’ was all Dave would admit. He turned back to the television, putting his hands in his pockets and awaiting the reappearance of Dr Zaresky.

The thing about Dave was, if you unpacked all of his post-feminist, intertextual, queer theory ideas, you were left with just one concept:
Does she have big tits?
After three years of negotiating cramped office space, enduring departmental briefings and buying rounds of cheap bitter at the Union bar, it had become all too clear to Charlotte that this was the foundation upon which all Dave’s philosophies rested. Charlotte would have preferred to share her office with a woman. Any woman. Except perhaps Dr Lempriere.

She turned back to the essays. The top one had a slightly sticky rust-coloured stain on the front page, the origin of which she didn’t wish to speculate on. She stared at the words on the title page but they no longer seemed to make any sense. She put the essays down again.

Jennifer had actually said that. On national television.

But there was every chance no one had seen it. Certainly Charlotte had made a point of telling no one about the program—and that was when she was still under the mistaken impression her sister was going on television to talk about violence in children’s computer games. (And what the hell was that? A smokescreen? How did ‘Violence in Computer Games’ become ‘I Saved My Sister’s Life!’?) But Dave had walked in, right in the middle of it, when surely—she glanced up at the clock that balanced on top of a bookshelf—yes, surely Dave should be running a first-year Subjectivity tute right now?

Her mobile phone went off with a series of alarming beeps and Charlotte jumped.

‘I wish you’d change that,’ remarked Dave, whose own mobile phone played the theme from
The A-Team
.

‘Hello?’

‘Charlotte? Why didn’t you tell me Jennifer was going to say all those things on the television? Why would she make up something like that? Wasn’t she going to be talking about violence and computer games?’

It was her mother.

Mrs Denzel worked Tuesdays at a respectable charity shop in the high street of a quiet commuter suburb in north-west London. She hadn’t missed a day at the shop in eight years—not counting holidays and the Tuesday four years earlier when she’d accompanied Dad to the hospital for his hernia operation—which meant she definitely shouldn’t be at home watching daytime television. Not on a Tuesday. And she never rang during office hours unless...

Charlotte couldn’t recall a single occasion when her mother had rung her at work before.

‘Charlotte?’

Various possible responses now presented themselves: excuses, evasions, platitudes, denials. She plumped for denial.

‘Oh, hi, Mum. You mean Jen
wasn’t
talking about computer games? I just turned on and caught the end—’

‘She was talking about
you!
About us!’ Mrs Denzel paused to let this sink in. ‘Did you know she was going to do that? You should have stopped her.’

On the television screen Dr Zaresky had returned, her lip gloss touched up, her smile fully armed and aimed straight at the studio audience, whom she charmed mutely before turning to her left. The camera zoomed in on a middle-aged black woman in a red dress and large diamond earrings, an awed expression on her face. Dave turned up the volume then reached up to fiddle with the aerial and the image shuddered.

‘I know nothing about it, Mum. I only caught the end. I can’t really say. It’s probably just some story she made up,’ said Charlotte dismissively.

She closed her eyes and into her head popped a vision of Jennifer’s face, Jennifer smiling and chatting, then not smiling or chatting because someone’s fist, Charlotte’s fist as it turned out, had smashed right into her mouth and shut her up.

Charlotte opened her eyes and little red spots flickered in the periphery of her vision.

‘But I don’t see why—’

‘Really, Mum, I’m sure none of whatever she said is true—except perhaps the shepherd’s pie and packet peas.’ Charlotte laughed weakly. Denial hadn’t worked, so maybe humour.

There was silence at the other end of the line. Then, ‘I always tried to give you children fresh vegetables,’ said Mrs Denzel, ‘until that new Safeway opened up in the high street, then it was just easier to buy frozen.’

Charlotte waited. She knew her mother hadn’t rung up to defend her cooking skills.

‘But don’t you think it’s a bit...
odd
? That she’d go on the telly and make up such things? I know she’s sometimes a bit...dramatic. Highly strung, they called it in my day. She got that from her grandmother, of course.’

She paused and Charlotte considered her grandmother. The idea that anyone might have considered Grandma Lake dramatic was baffling.

‘But to make things up...?’ said Mrs Denzel, then she fell silent as though a thought had just struck her. ‘Do you think maybe she believes it herself? Thinks it really happened? They do say—’

‘No, I don’t,’ interrupted Charlotte. ‘I just think she enjoys the attention, particularly if it’s at my expense. And she’s been desperate to get on Kim’s program for a year.’

That wasn’t quite true—Kim’s program had only been running since the autumn and the way the ratings were going it would be lucky to last till the spring. As for Jennifer being desperate to get on it, well, they’d never actually discussed it, but some things you just knew.

Violence in children’s computer games! What a load of rubbish.

‘Well, I think you should ask her about it... Or should we just pretend we didn’t watch it?’ said Mrs Denzel doubtfully.

Charlotte said nothing. She didn’t need to ask Jennifer about it. She didn’t need to ask Jennifer about anything.

There was a gasp at the other end of the phone.

‘Who else do you think might have seen it?’

And that, of course, was the key question. Charlotte could almost hear her mother mentally flicking through an address book containing the names of every relative and acquaintance of the last thirty years and calculating their likely proximity to a television set at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in late January.

Not many, surely?

Did they know anyone who watched daytime television? Who was unemployed? A housewife? Working from home? A student? Sick? Suddenly the possibilities seemed endless. And nowadays people had televisions in their workplaces—she was staring at one herself.

On the screen Dr Zaresky was now explaining the terrible toll that kleptomania took on families and Dave stood there transfixed.

‘Mum, it’s Tuesday afternoon, everyone’s at work. And it’s daytime TV—no one’s watching it.’

And that was perfectly true. No one that she knew, no one who knew her, would have watched it. It didn’t matter what complete strangers thought of her.

‘And I can assure you I didn’t tell anyone to watch it,’ she added.

‘I brought the small portable into the shop and set it up in the back room and we all watched it,’ said Mrs Denzel. ‘June Craven from head office came in halfway through and Irene Field’s daughter-in-law from the cafe popped in too.’

Ouch.

Jennifer had wanted them to watch. They’d both received a brief email the day before informing them she was going to be appearing on Kim’s show. It was supposed to be an alarmist and morally indignant segment on the trend towards violence in children’s toys. Jennifer, who managed the toy department of a large London department store, would provide the retailer’s viewpoint.