The Past and Other Lies (8 page)

Charlotte smiled faintly in reply. Somewhere in another building a fire alarm began to ring.

Another bell was ringing. It was the bell in the school gymnasium signalling the end of the first period of the afternoon, a Thursday afternoon during the last week of the summer term. A summer that had ended twenty-five years ago.

Outside was the clatter of feet, the screams and shouts of a schoolful of children emerging from classrooms and corridors, swarming towards other classrooms and other corridors. The screams and shouts reached a crescendo then faded. Inside the gymnasium an exam was in progress and there was still an hour left to go. Heads raised, listening to the din outside, then lowered again. No one moved.

No one moved, except for Charlotte, who pushed back her chair from her desk in the seventh row, who stood up right in the middle of a trigonometry question, who knocked her chair with a loud thud onto the parquetry floor and ran out.

She’d been staring at the trigonometry question for ten, fifteen minutes and she knew the answer, had already worked it out in her head (because really trigonometry was quite simple) but had been unable to write down a single number because her eyes were stinging, her teeth were clenched so tightly her jaw was aching and the hand holding her pencil was shaking so that the only marks she made on the answer booklet resembled small bird tracks.

Funny how important a maths exam had seemed at the start of the year—at the start of the day, even. And it was odd how much time you spent preparing and practising and worrying about it and how a good maths grade had seemed essential to one’s entrance into the A-level course, into university, into a career, the rest of your life. And yet it all came down to this one stupid question about a man walking five miles on a bearing of 092 degrees that any idiot could answer but that she was suddenly, bewilderingly, unable to put down on the paper.

Two hours before she had stood outside the girls’ toilet block. Two hours ago someone—Julie Fanshawe, a friend of Jennifer’s—had called her over, had said, all snide-like with that fake schoolgirl concern,
Hey Charlotte, there’s something written about you in the girls’ toilets
. And Charlotte had marched over there not knowing what to expect but angry. And with a sudden knot twisting her stomach in half.

And now here she was doing a question on trigonometry. A man walking five miles on a bearing of 092 degrees.

At which point she’d realised if she stayed in the gym one more minute she was going to be sick. Or worse, cry. She hadn’t made a decision to leave, just found herself pushing back her chair so that it had fallen with a thud onto the floor and she had fled the hall, leaving her exam paper and her answer booklet and her pencil case with her calculator and ruler and protractor on the desk and vividly,
agonisingly
, aware that every head had turned to stare at her, that three invigilators had started up after her, which was exactly, it was
exactly
what she hadn’t wanted. Everyone staring.

A girl running at five miles per hour on a bearing of 092 degrees.

She escaped across the quadrangle and through the teachers’ car park to the side gate and away. There was a bus pulling up at the bus stop that would have deposited her right outside her house but instead she turned in the opposite direction, running, needing to put distance between herself and the school. When, much later, she arrived home, she fumbled with the front door key, ran straight upstairs and shut herself in the bedroom she still shared with Jennifer.

If Mum had been home she might have wondered why Charlotte was home at three forty-five when the maths O-level wasn’t scheduled to finish till four o’clock. But Mum wasn’t at home, she was sitting in the waiting room of Dr Caddington’s surgery with Grandma Lake, who needed a new prescription for some unnamed complaint. So when Charlotte arrived home with her school jumper tied around her waist and her face pale and carrying only a pencil there was no one to notice.

When it became apparent the house was empty she came to a dead stop in the middle of the bedroom, there being nowhere else to run.

Her school bag was hanging on the back of the door where she’d left it that morning because you were only allowed to take pens and pencils and calculators and protractors and rulers into the exam. Next to the bag was the pink jumper she’d bought Jennifer for her seventeenth birthday last September. Her own seventeenth was less than a month away and she stared at the jumper and her own fast-approaching birthday with equal dismay.

She snatched up the jumper and clutched it tightly in both fists so that the wool stretched taut. Then she remembered that one of the faces that had stared at her as she’d fled the exam hall had been Zoe’s, and she groaned and sat down on the floor because she would never again visit Zoe’s house in Beechtree Crescent.

Hours passed. Mum came home. Grandma Lake settled in front of the telly. Tea was served and Jennifer still hadn’t come home from school.

‘She’s out with her friends,’ Mum said and no one asked why Charlotte wasn’t out too, when it was the last day of exams. Dad said, How did you do in the exam, then? and Mum said, Aren’t you going to eat that, dear? and then Charlotte went back upstairs.

Perhaps they assumed Jennifer was out with Darren. But Darren came round at seven looking for her. Charlotte had already finished her tea and was standing at the top of the stairs when the doorbell rang, so it was she who saw Darren’s familiar green parka through the frosted glass of the front door and she who, on the second ring, went woodenly downstairs and opened the door.

Darren. She stared at him. Jennifer wasn’t with him. She almost closed the door on him because the last thing she wanted, the very last thing, was her sister’s boyfriend standing there in the doorway staring at her.

‘Is Jen in?’ Darren said with his northern accent and it was such a normal, Darren thing to say that at first she just stood there.

‘No,’ she replied at last. Where was Jen? Probably out with her friends drinking milkshakes at Wimpey in the high street or down by the canal talking to boys from the grammar school. Having a good time, at any rate, while her boyfriend was standing here looking for her. Lucky Jennifer. Lucky, popular, pretty Jennifer.

The door to the lounge was ajar and Dad was watching
Capital Tonight
.

‘
...a sheep dip in Tower Hamlets
,’ Naomi Findlay, longtime presenter of the program, announced obscurely in her perfectly enunciated Home Counties voice. The incongruity of such words taken out of context seemed to give them portent, like words spoken by a prophet.
A sheep dip in Tower Hamlets
.

Charlotte took a deep breath, a hard lump filling her stomach. It had been there most of the afternoon, but now it began to glow hot and red, and it travelled up her spine and flushed her cheeks so that they burned. The pounding that had been beating away behind her eyeballs all evening quickened then suddenly vanished.

‘I’m sorry, Darren.’ Her mouth assumed the shape of a sympathetic smile. ‘Jen’s out with Adrian Cresswell.’

The words slid from her mouth as smoothly as the truth might have done. Adrian Cresswell. He and Jennifer had briefly been an item in third year, everyone knew that. The lie was so believable it could almost have been the truth.

Darren’s lips parted slightly, his eyes widened. He swallowed, the way you did when you were in pain.

‘She’s been out with him a lot this week,’ Charlotte continued. ‘I expect she told you she was out with Nikki and Julie?’

Darren swallowed but said nothing.

‘I told her to tell you, I told her it wasn’t fair on you, particularly now everyone at school knows about it...’

That was it, of course. That was the killer punch:
everyone at school knows about it
. Yes, she knew how that felt.

She thought about saying ‘I’m so sorry’ again, but that would have been overdoing it so she just smiled awkwardly, the way a sister might have smiled in such a situation.

Darren’s eyes glassed over and it seemed as though he was going to demand to know more but instead he turned abruptly and walked, almost ran really, down the driveway and into the light cast by the streetlamp. Then he was gone and Charlotte closed the front door after him and went up the stairs to her room.

‘Who was it?’ Mum called from the lounge.

‘No one. Double-glazing salesman,’ she replied, then she closed the bedroom door and there on the floor was Jennifer’s pink jumper with red lipstick all over its front just as though someone had deliberately drawn on it.

Jennifer had come home eventually, giggling and tripping over the loose carpet on the landing and making the bedroom stink of cheap cider—it was a Friday night near the end of term after all. But by the following night Darren had been seen down at the canal with Roberta Peabody and Jennifer had sobbed noisily long into the night while Charlotte had lain hard and cold in bed and stared at the shadows on the wall.

In the unheated meeting room that was currently home to the Waverley University Academic Dress Sub-Committee, the clock inched forward to nine fifty-one and Charlotte was preparing to speak:
We could
always take a vote on it
. These were the words she would say. Not the most scintillating words ever spoken, it was true, and as suggestions went it was hardly pithy, but it was at least constructive. She would say it.

Nine fifty-three.

A second scene popped into her head. Herself and Nick, who was now Jennifer’s ex, though at the time he was her fiancé, seated in a small cafe just off the Embankment. Another scene and another lie twenty years after the first scene, the first lie. But connected, she suddenly realised, because she’d still felt guilty about Darren McKenzie. Had continued to feel guilty right up until Jennifer’s wedding.

Nine fifty-five.

At least as far as lies went this one had passed unnoticed and that was important, more important than the fact that her sister had been having an affair with a work colleague a month before her wedding. But the lie had been told and the wedding had gone ahead.

Still, Jennifer and Nick were divorced now, so what did it matter?

The cafe was a classic greasy spoon tucked beneath the shadow of Waterloo Bridge. The lie was this:

‘
Honestly, Nick, do you really believe Jen would be out getting measurements for her wedding dress if she was having an affair with someone else?
’

That was it. Hardly a lie at all, really, if you thought about it. Just a question, in fact. A question asked over a lukewarm coffee in a cafe just off the Embankment on a cold February lunchtime four years ago, and after she’d asked it, Charlotte picked up her chipped mug and held it to her lips and swallowed down a lukewarm mouthful because she liked her future brother-in-law and she had just lied to his face because she owed it to Jennifer.

It was a Saturday lunchtime and the cafe was busy with tourists staring mutely at the stale croissants and limp salads on their plates and at the stained cutlery with which they were expected to eat it. Nick was wearing a sweater and a sports jacket and looked wealthier than he really was so that for a moment Charlotte had felt proud to be seen with him—it was a novelty, this going out to lunch with a good-looking man—but the feeling had frozen inside her when Nick had said the one thing that he wasn’t meant to say.