The Past and Other Lies (4 page)

Jennifer kicked the bedroom door wide open in an explosion of anger that evaporated into something else entirely when she saw, before her, legs kicking a foot above the fallen chair.

Charlotte was wearing her tartan slippers, the ones Aunt Caroline had given her last Christmas. Jennifer had been given a similar pair, also tartan, and of the sort of suffocating blue and green that only a department store could produce and an aunt could purchase. Those slippers now dangled in the air beneath a pair of stone-washed jeans. Pepe jeans, so tight at the ankle you had to lie on your back to pull them on. The tartan-slippered feet seemed to burst out of the narrow legs like duck’s feet: a cartoon Scottish duck’s feet. At Charlotte’s waist, wrapped almost twice around, was the yellow canvas belt, purchased at Wembley market only the month before, and above that was last year’s Madness T-shirt, already shapeless and faded from too many washes, and from which two skinny white arms reached up, clutching wildly.

Which was when Jennifer saw the tie.

It was the school tie, Henry Morton Secondary, with its distinctive diagonal grey and red stripes. School uniform colours. Their school. And one end was tied to the light fitting, the other was tied into a loop and the loop, a tiny loop, barely wide enough for a person’s head, was around her neck.

It was around her neck.

Above the loop was Charlotte. Charlotte’s head. Twisted to one side, her hands scrambling for a hold, her face the colour of a washed-out February sky, of sticky window putty, of dough made from wholemeal flour. It was not the colour of skin. Her mouth was taut, the lips peeled back and an oddly bluish colour.

And the worst thing was—

The worst thing of all.

Jennifer knew why she was up there.

Someone screamed. Or perhaps it was more a groan. Either way it was cut short when Jennifer surged forward, snatching instinctively at the thrashing legs, her face buried in the denim of the dangling trouser legs in a desperate attempt to take their weight on her shoulders, in her arms.

And the legs were a dead weight. Jennifer kept trying to grab more and more of them, to take more and more of their weight and all the while she was thinking
, How long? How long has she been like this? All the time we were pouring gravy over our shepherd’s pie? Taking our seats at the dining-room table? Since before
Crossroads
came on? Before Dad came in from work? How long?
And at the same time her mind raced forward to a time that hadn’t happened yet but was about to: herself calling out,
Help! Someone help me!
and Mum and Dad running up the stairs, coming in, finding them, cries, screams, dismay. An ambulance being called, a lifeless body on a stretcher with the blanket (a red one) pulled up over Charlotte’s face, the neighbours standing in clusters in their doorways, of hours spent sitting in white hospital corridors trying to get the attention of elusive doctors, of a policeman taking a statement and a WPC comforting Mum, someone asking,
Why? Why would she do such a thing?
Endless cups of tasteless vending-machine tea in white plastic cups. And life, her own life, stretching bleakly ahead from this point onwards into...nothing.

Jennifer groaned, sobbed and clutched even tighter and the legs kicked, they actually kicked, and she had the greatest difficulty keeping hold of those legs as her eyes sprayed tears and her mouth gasped, and she knew she must do something more.

The something more was the pair of tiny, slightly rusted nail scissors lying on the dressing-table beside the open bottle of shocking-pink nail polish.

Jennifer shifted the now wriggling legs to her right arm, reached over and snatched up the scissors, reached above both their heads and tried to cut the hated school tie. Which is when she realised it was impossible to cut using your left hand, so she sobbed and gasped some more and switched the legs to her left arm, the scissors to her right hand and began to cut and cut and cut like a manic dressmaker an hour before an important fashion show.

The tie proved to be made of good-quality material, and the cutting was more hacking than precision snipping, but eventually a tear was made in the awful stuff and the weight of Charlotte’s body and of Jennifer hacking and snipping for all she was worth helped the strands to rip until at last it gave and the two bodies dropped to the floor with a bone-jarring thud.

Jennifer’s forehead connected with her kneecap, the back of her head crashed onto the floor and there was a tangle of arms and legs. She found herself on her back staring up at the remaining length of tie, her thumb and forefinger still looped through the handles of the nail scissors, a red depression in her skin so deep it bruised the bone. As she stared up at that piece of tie it occurred to her that it was actually two pieces of tie—that is, two ties knotted together—which was how Charlotte had made it long enough to fasten to both the light fitting and around her own neck. And as Charlotte only had one school tie it was reasonable to assume that the other tie was Jennifer’s. This time Jennifer did not experience a rush of fury that Charlotte had stolen something of hers.

On the floor beside her, Charlotte made a gurgling, choking, groaning sound. Jennifer lifted her head off the carpet and stared at her sister and opened her mouth to say something (what, she had no idea) when they both heard Mum’s voice in the hallway downstairs.

‘Charlotte! Jennifer! For heaven’s sake, your dinners are getting cold and I’m not putting them in the oven. And you’re missing
Crossroads
.’

As Mum spoke these words, they stared at each other and because Charlotte was alive and staring at her and because Jennifer knew why this had happened, she knew—they both knew—that neither of them was going to say anything.

‘Al
right
. I’m coming!’ Jennifer called back, her voice unnaturally high, quavering. She did not take her eyes off Charlotte. Downstairs the theme from
Crossroads
reached a climax then abruptly fell silent.

Jennifer eased herself up onto her elbows then, painfully, to her knees. Charlotte hadn’t moved. She lay on her back, her—or possibly Jennifer’s—grey-and-red striped tie, torn and askew around her neck, so that she looked like a punk rocker. She was no longer looking at Jennifer but was staring up at the ceiling and Jennifer wanted to demand to know what she was thinking. Then she remembered all over again why this had happened and she said nothing.

Instead she reached down and began, this time with careful snips, to cut the tie from around Charlotte’s neck. The loss of two school ties was going to take some explaining, she realised grimly.

When she had finished Jennifer got to her feet. Then she dropped straight onto her bed as it became clear her legs were not going to hold her weight. So she sat on the edge of the bed and clasped her knees and discovered she was going to be sick.

At the same time, she saw that the two butchered school ties were the least of their worries, for around Charlotte’s throat was a vivid red mark that looked exactly as though she had just tried to hang herself.

Jennifer wondered if she was going to make it to the bathroom before she was sick.

O
N THAT SAME Wednesday morning, as Charlotte was sliding her Fiesta into the library car park on Waverley University’s main campus, Jennifer Denzel stood in the middle of the toy department on the fifth floor of Gossup and Batch’s department store in London’s West End pondering the problem of Barbie versus Action Man.

She had the same problem at this time every year: Christmas was over, the Grotto that had consumed almost a quarter of the toy department’s precious floor space had finally been dismantled, the Santa Claus costumes had been dry-cleaned and stored away, and all of Santa’s helpers had rejoined the dole queue or moved back to Vancouver or Dublin or Perth or wherever it was they had come from. The January sales had come and gone, and now she was stuck with the usual decision about which was to fill the gap: Barbie or Action Man?

Located in a six-storey early-Victorian mansion just off Regent Street, Gossup and Batch was one of London’s oldest still-operational department stores, and even in the new millennium it still clung valiantly to an aura of late-Victorian gentility. The words
Emporium of Elegance
still adorned the main entrance in ornate italics and were picked out in silver letters on the store’s famous burgundy shopping bags, and doormen in gold-braided livery still tipped their top hats as you entered and departed.

Unfortunately, it appeared the modern shopper no longer cared to traipse through dozens of departments and past hundreds of elegantly presented products in order to find a single item. They preferred to nip into a boutique in their lunch hour. They liked to park on a rooftop and take a lift down to a covered shopping mall. They chose discounts and wholesale prices over quality and excellent service.

An unspectacular stock market float in the late nineties had done little to halt the store’s decline, and with shares dipping to just eight-seven pence the latest general manager had just been quietly and expensively dispatched.

As well as plummeting standards and a teetering share price, employee turnover was high and the title of the unofficial staff newsletter,
Gossip and Bitch
, gave some indication why. Jennifer was one of the very few exceptions in this perilous climate, having survived nine years at Gossup and Batch, and was now, thanks largely to an ability to keep her head down, manager of the toy department.

Peacekeeper™, she observed, wasn’t selling well.

She frowned at the multitude of figures on the latest print-out from marketing and was only vaguely surprised to note that an interactive board game where players moved from one global trouble spot to another, settling disputes between warring nations through a combination of economic and diplomatic manoeuvres, and that had been extensively advertised on television in the run-up to Christmas, had failed to sell.

What kid wanted to
prevent
wars?

It was a relief she and Nick had never had children.

The more traditional board games were past their use-by date in a modern toy department. Who wanted to play Ludo or Snakes and Ladders when you could play Surveillance: Spy on your neighbours!™ with a micro digital video camera and a listen-through-walls bugging device?

‘There’s a phone call for you. Mr Gaspari.’

It was Gloria Clements, her PA, making a rare visit onto the sales floor.

Gloria was younger than Jennifer but had somehow notched up fifteen years’ service at Gossup’s. Her mother, Alfreda, a huge woman with an alarming bust, was one of an army of West Indian, Fijian and Turkish cleaning women who descended on the store at closing time, and on the rare occasions when her mother made it up to the toy department before Gloria had left for the evening, Gloria would scoop up her bag and sweep tight-lipped out of the office.

Gloria didn’t have children either. In fact, oddly, no one in the toy department had children.

Or maybe it wasn’t odd. Maybe it made perfect sense.

Jennifer looked up from the sales print-out and regarded Gloria thoughtfully. A telephone call from Mr Gaspari? Mr Gaspari was on the board of directors and as far as she could recall he had never, in nine years, rung her. It seemed surprising he even knew who she was. Could it be the Ring Me!™ thing? Surely that hadn’t made it all the way up to the boardroom, had it?

Gloria returned her gaze expressionlessly.

‘And did you ask what it was concerning?’ Jennifer prompted.

‘No. I didn’t ask.’

Gloria, Jennifer felt reasonably certain, disliked her. It was possible to attribute this dislike to what is conveniently excused as a clash of personalities, but it would be more accurate to put it down to the incident with Gloria’s fiance, Adam Finch, four years ago.

‘Well,’ Jennifer said slowly and calmly, ‘why don’t you go and ask him, and if it’s important I’ll call him straight back and if it’s not, take a message.’

She turned away and studied the first aisle of girls’ toys. The single biggest seller in the pre-school section was My First Phone™, a plush mobile phone with nursery-rhyme ring-tones that middle-management parents picked out for the offspring they had just deposited at long daycare. For the pre-teens there was a Britney Spears version called Ring Me!™ in Barbie-pink fun-fur that imparted such profound messages as ‘
I rilly wanna see you tonight!
’ and ‘
Can I go out with you?
’ and ‘
I miss you
so
much!
’ in a pre-recorded preppy American voice. After less than a month on the shelves, the toy department sales team had been so driven to the point of insanity by the continual playing of Ring Me!™ by excited eight-year-olds that they had removed the batteries and put the product on the top shelf out of reach. Naturally, sales had been affected and comments had been made at the monthly executive meeting upstairs. The phones had been returned to the lower shelves and the sales team had been given booklets on stress management.

Gloria hadn’t moved.

‘I need Saturday off,’ she stated flatly and Jennifer perused her sales print-out in a leisurely fashion and waited for more.

‘It’s a fitting for the dress,’ said Gloria finally. ‘She can only do me Saturday morning. I have to go down to Camberwell.’

So that was it. The wedding. Jennifer squinted more closely at the figures. She chewed her lip to indicate that she might be listening and she might be about to approve this somewhat tardy request. On the other hand she might not.

The wedding was Gloria’s wedding to Adam Finch. Adam was a fellow employee at Gossup’s to whom Gloria had been engaged for more than a year. He was also the Adam of The Incident, which was why Jennifer was not going to the wedding and why Gloria was reluctant to provide it as a reason for wanting Saturday off. Jennifer tapped her pencil contemplatively on her print-out and thought she heard Gloria’s jaw muscles clenching behind her.

‘I was planning a stocktake this Saturday,’ said Jennifer, still studying her print-out. Somewhere nearby a phone rang.