The Truth-Teller's Lie (13 page)

Charlie wasn’t sure she wanted Steph to take her sister away. ‘Liv, don’t rush off into the night,’ she said. ‘It’s late. Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow?’

‘Because you’re too busy ingratiating yourself with anything that has a penis to talk to me, that’s why.’ Olivia clomped down the stairs in her high-heeled Manolo Blahnik sandals, carrying her suitcase.

‘Olivia, the last thing I want to do is ruin your holiday,’ said Graham.

She ignored him, looked at Charlie. ‘How long are you going to carry on doing this? Fucking anything that moves, just to prove something to bloody Simon Waterhouse?’

Charlie felt the heat of shame spread across her face and down her neck.

‘You’ve got a problem, Char. It’s about time you dealt with it. Why don’t you . . . stop trying to fill the wrong hole and go and see a shrink or something?’

Once Olivia had slammed the door, Charlie burst into tears, covering her face with her hands. Graham put his arms round her. ‘I’m only crying because I’m so angry,’ she told him.

‘Don’t be angry. Poor old Fat Girl Slim. It can’t have been much fun for her, listening to us canoodling, can it?’

‘Don’t call my sister that!’

‘What, even though she’s just called you a slapper and me—now let me get this right—oh, yes, “anything that has a penis”?’ He risked a small grin.

Charlie couldn’t help laughing, though she was still crying. ‘Do you have to give everything and everyone a nickname? I’m Ma’am, Steph’s the dogsbody, now Olivia’s Fat Girl Slim . . .’

‘I’m sorry. Really. I was just trying to lighten the mood.’ He stroked Charlie’s back. ‘Look, you’ll sort it out. Steph’ll tell us tomorrow which hotel she’s gone to. I’ll give you a lift into Edinburgh and you can kiss and make up properly. Okay?’

‘Okay.’ Charlie pulled her cigarettes and lighter out of her bag. ‘If you tell me this chalet’s non-smoking, I’ll smash your head in.’

‘Wouldn’t dare. Ma’am. Guv.’

‘All that stuff Liv said about me . . .’

‘She was just lashing out because she felt exluded. I’ve forgotten it already.’

‘Thank you.’ Charlie squeezed Graham’s hand. Thank God: a gentleman, she thought. Still, sleeping with him tonight was no longer a possibility, not with Olivia’s words buzzing around her head.
Stop trying to fill the wrong hole.
Bitch.

‘Charlie, stop worrying,’ said Graham. ‘You and Fat Girl Slim are solid; I can tell. You’ve got a better relationship than most siblings.’

‘Are you taking the piss?’

‘No. I’m dead serious. You yell at each other. That’s a good sign. I haven’t spoken to my brother properly for years.’

‘You said you were in business with him.’

Graham looked unhappy suddenly. ‘We are. Despite everything, we are, but he’s done his best to ruin the business, that’s the trouble. I’m the sensible, cautious one . . .’

‘I find that hard to believe,’ Charlie teased him.

‘It’s true. I don’t take stupid risks we can’t afford, because I want it to work. So I set it up and he pulls it down, or tries to.’

‘How can you still work together if you don’t talk?’ Charlie asked.

Graham tried to smile, but his forehead didn’t lose its worried creases. ‘It’s too absurd,’ he said. ‘You’ll laugh if I tell you.’

‘Go on.’

‘We liaise via the dogsbody.’ Graham shook his head. ‘Anyway . . .’ he leaned over and tried to pull Charlie back into bed ‘. . . let’s not talk about our family probs any more. We’ve got the place to ourselves. Let’s shag each other senseless, as your good sis suggested, then we’ll be all contrite when we go and see her tomorrow.’

‘Graham . . .’ said Charlie, pulling away from his kiss. ‘I think these chalets are absolutely perfect. Dinner tonight was unbelievable and the spa’s as good as any hotel’s. I think the business will be just fine. Not even your incompetent brother could make a place like this unprofitable.’

‘Is that so, Sarge? Hey, I’ve got a top idea. Since you liked dinner so much, I’m going to phone the dogsbody and order us some brekkie in bed for the morning.’ He reached for his phone again.

‘Don’t!’ Charlie yelped, grabbing his arm. ‘She’s with Olivia!’

‘Oh, yeah. Fuck! We won’t seem very contrite, will we, if we’re already thinking about tomorrow’s black pudding and hash browns. Yum.’

‘Someone rang me,’ Charlie remembered suddenly. She’d forgotten, in all the drama, that her phone had rung and started the row with Olivia. What if that hadn’t happened? Would Olivia have lain awake, furious and resentful, listening to Charlie and Graham having sex?

‘It can wait, can’t it?’ said Graham.

‘Let me just see who it was.’

‘You haven’t got any other fat, scary sisters, have you, guv?’

‘Don’t call her that!’

Charlie pressed the unanswered calls button and saw Simon’s number. Shit. He’d never ring her on holiday unless it was something serious. Simon was meticulous about respecting more privacy than any normal person could ever want or need. ‘I’ve got to make a quick phone call,’ said Charlie. ‘I’m sorry, it’s work. I’ll go outside.’ She pulled on her coat and pushed her feet into her trainers, squashing the backs with her heels. ‘You wait here.’

‘Think I will, as I’ve got no clothes on. And hurry up or I might be asleep when you get back. Like a tired, overworked husband in a TV movie, when his wife spends too long beautifying herself in the bathroom. You can stand over me and smile fondly.’

‘What are you talking about, you nutter?’

‘There, see, you’re smiling fondly already!’

Charlie shook her head, bemused, and took her cigarettes, lighter and phone outside. She liked Graham. Really liked him. He was funny. Maybe Olivia would have liked him too, if Charlie had handled things a bit more shrewdly. What a disaster of a night. And Simon had phoned, and she’d missed the call. Charlie felt more guilty about that than about Olivia. She lit a Marlboro Light, took a long drag. On the other side of the field was the lodge, which housed Graham’s office. The light was still on, but the muddy car that was outside earlier had gone. The window’s small square of gold-yellow, the pale-blue screen of Charlie’s mobile phone and the tiny strip of fiery orange at the end of her cigarette were the only lights she could see. This place felt more foreign than Spain.

She looked at Simon’s mobile number on the screen and pressed the call button, rehearsing what she would say as soon as he answered: ‘I thought I made it clear I didn’t want any interruptions on holiday.’ She wouldn’t say it too harshly, though.

10

Thursday, April 6

IT IS TWO in the morning. I am downstairs, curled in a tight ball on the sofa in front of the television, heavy and disorientated with tiredness but afraid to go to bed. I know I wouldn’t sleep. I pick up the remote control and press the mute button. I could turn the TV off, but I’m superstitious. The flickering images on the screen are a link to something. They are all that’s keeping me from slipping off the edge of the world.

All my cowardice comes out at night, all the weak and helpless feelings that I spend all day every day beating down.

My lounge window is a big square of black, with two gold globes of light reflected in it and, under those yellow discs, a washed-out counterpart of me. I look like a woman who is all alone. When I was little, I used to believe that if you let darkness into a well-lit room, it would become dark, just as it becomes light in the morning when you let the light in. My dad explained to me why it was different, but I wasn’t convinced. Usually I close my curtains as soon as the sky starts to turn from blue to grey.

Tonight there’s no point; the darkness is in the house already. It’s in Yvon’s absence, and the mess the police left, though I’m sure they think they tidied up after themselves, just as Yvon believes she’s tidied up if she puts torn-up envelopes, squashed tea bags and sandwich crusts on the lid of the kitchen bin.

She’s left most of her things here, which I am forcing myself to see as a good sign. All night I’ve wanted to ring her, but I’ve done nothing about it. Concealing what happened to me three years ago was easy. Walking into a police station and accusing an innocent man of rape was easy. So why is it so hard to phone my best friend and say sorry?

Yvon will think I don’t care; that I might be scared would never occur to her. Of the two of us, I’m the frightening one. She teases me about it. It’s true, I can be intimidating when I want to be. One pointed look from me is enough to make Yvon wipe up all the crumbs on the kitchen counter or put the lid back on the butter dish after she’s used it. I like things to be tidy. I can’t think straight if they’re not. Tools are never left out in my workshop overnight; I always put them back in their proper place on the shelf: my dummy mallets next to my diamond whetstone, which lives next to my chisels.

You’d understand. At the Traveltel, you arrange your clothes neatly on the back of the sofa before getting into bed. I’ve never seen one of your socks on the floor. When I told Yvon this, she wrinkled her nose and said you sounded like a geek. I said it wasn’t like that at all, she was imagining it wrongly if she thought that. You’re cool about it, quick too. You must have practised, because you always make it seem as if you just happened to drop your clothes exactly parallel to the edge of the settee.

Do you remember, I once said to you that if Yvon ever disappeared, the police would be able to list everything she had recently eaten without too much trouble? To think of this now that you’re missing makes the hairs on my arms stand up. But it’s true. Dried pink flakes stuck to the underside of a frying pan would point clearly to salmon for dinner the previous night. A pan of congealed white fat with burned black bits in it would be evidence that she’d had sausages for lunch.

You told me I should insist that she clears up after herself. When I do, she accuses me of tyranny. ‘You’re turning into a monster,’ she says, reluctantly removing a three-week-old empty milk carton from the fridge.

I’m so used to it now, my nobody’s-going-to-get-away-with-anything attitude, I don’t think I could change back. I have become —deliberately at first, though it soon stopped feeling like an effort—a person who makes an issue out of any small thing. ‘Go with the flow,’ Yvon is always telling me. But to me, going with the flow means marching obediently, at knifepoint, towards a stranger’s car.

If I hadn’t become a monster, you might never have noticed me that day in the service station. I don’t know how much of the row you saw or heard. Nor have I ever managed to extract from you certain crucial pieces of information, such as whether you too were eating in the food court that day. Perhaps you were in the shop, on the other side of the covered walkway, and you only came over when you heard me shouting. I’d like to know, because I love the story of how we met and I want it to be complete.

I was on my way to see a possible customer, an elderly lady who wanted somebody to restore the cube sundial in her garden, which she said was eighteenth century and in bad condition. I’d told her I did mainly original commissions and very little restoration work, but she’d sounded so despondent that I’d relented and agreed to go and look at her dial. I realised I was hungry almost as soon as I set off, so I stopped at Rawndesley East Services.

No sane person expects decent food from a service station, and I was quite prepared for my chicken, chips and peas to be lukewarm, greasy and flavourless. I’m not like you; I don’t mind mediocre food sometimes. It can be comforting to eat junk. But on this occasion, what was handed to me on a tray was offensive. Did you see it? Were you close enough, at that point, to get a proper look?

The chicken was grey and reeked of old dustbins that have never been washed. The smell made me retch. I told the man who was serving me that the meat was off. He rolled his eyes, as if I was being difficult, and said that I hadn’t even tasted it yet. If it tasted bad, I could bring it back and he’d give me a new meal, he said, but he wasn’t prepared to take it back when I hadn’t even tried it. I asked to speak to the manager and he told me, sullenly, that he was in charge, the boss wasn’t in yet.

‘When will
she
be in?’ I asked, hoping he was the sort of man who would hate to have a woman as a boss.

‘It’s a he,’ he said. ‘Not for another two hours.’

‘Fine. Then I’ll wait. And when your manager arrives, I’ll advise him to fire you.’

‘Suit yourself.’ The man shrugged. His name was Bruce Doherty. He was wearing a badge.

‘You only need to take one look at this chicken to know it’s bad! It’s rotting! You taste it if you don’t believe me.’

‘No thanks.’ He smirked.

I took that as an acknowledgement that the meat was past its sell-by date and he knew it; he was gloating, showing me he didn’t care. ‘I’m going to make sure you get sacked, you wanker!’ I yelled in his face. ‘What’ll you do then, hey? Brain surgeon? Rocket scientist? Or maybe something that’s better suited to your talents: wiping shit off toilets, or selling your arse to visiting businessmen round the back of Rawndesley Station!’

He ignored me. There were people queuing behind me and he turned to the first of these, saying, ‘Sorry about that. What can I get you?’

‘Look, I’m very busy,’ I told him. ‘All I want is a plate of food that isn’t poisonous.’

A frumpily dressed middle-aged woman, waiting to be served, touched my arm. ‘There are children here,’ she said, pointing to a table across the room.

I shook her hand off me. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Children who, if it was up to you and him and everyone else in here, would be fed rotting chicken and die of E. coli!’

Everybody left me alone after that. I phoned the woman that I was on my way to see about the cube dial and told her I’d been held up. Then I sat down at the table nearest to the serving counter, with my tray of stinking food in front of me, waiting for the boss to arrive. Rage bubbled inside me, but I think I did a pretty good job of appearing calm. I can’t control everything, but I can make sure that no stranger is able to guess how I’m feeling simply by looking at me.

I caught Bruce Doherty’s eye every now and then. It wasn’t long before he started to look uncomfortable. Giving up didn’t enter my head as a possibility. This was one small bit of justice I was determined to get. I’ll vandalise the place, I thought. I’ll walk round the room tipping people’s trays of food on to the floor. I’ll pick up my plate of hot poisonous slop and throw it in the manager’s face.

After I’d waited for nearly an hour and a half, I saw you walking towards me. My anger had thickened and risen inside me so that it blocked out every other thought and feeling. That’s why I didn’t notice at first how odd you looked as you approached. You were wearing your grey collarless shirt and jeans, smiling at me, balancing a wooden tray on one hand, like a waiter. I saw your smile first. I was starving, dizzy, sustained only by my vindictive fantasies. My insides felt cold and hollow, and there was a sharp metallic taste in my mouth.

You walked a perfect straight line towards me, with your free arm behind your back. I only noticed you properly once you were standing beside my table. I was aware that the tray in your hand wasn’t the same kind as the ones that were all over the food court—discarded on tables and in a tall pile in front of the counter where Doherty was still serving his lethal slop. Your tray was real wood, not wood-effect plastic.

On it was a knife and fork wrapped in a white cloth napkin, an empty glass and a bottle of white wine. Pinot Grigio: your favourite kind. This, like the coincidence of our meeting at the service station, sowed the seeds of a tradition. We have never shared a bottle of wine that wasn’t Pinot Grigio; we meet at the Traveltel—even though you say it’s not romantic enough, even though we could find somewhere much nicer for the same price—because Rawndesley East Services is where we first met. You have the mentality of an anxious collector, eager to preserve everything, to lose nothing we once had. Your love of tradition and ritual is one of the many things that has endeared you to me: the way you seize on anything pleasurable or good that happens by chance and try to make a custom out of it.

I tried to tell the police this—that a man who insists on drinking the same wine in the same room on the same day of every week would not suddenly break his own devout routine by disappearing without notice—but all they could do was look at me with stony indifference.

You picked up the tray Doherty had given me and placed it on the adjacent table. Then you put your tray down in front of me. Beside the napkin and cutlery was a china plate with a dome-shaped silver lid. You removed this without saying anything, smiling proudly. I was amazed, confused. As I told you later, I thought you were Doherty’s boss; somehow you’d heard about what had happened, perhaps from another member of staff, and you were here to make amends.

But you weren’t wearing the red-and-blue uniform or a name badge. And this was no ordinary amends. This was
Magret de Canard aux Poires.
You told me the name the next time we met. To me it looked like slices of tender duck breast—brown at the sides and pink in the middle—arranged in a neat circle around a peeled, cooked whole pear. It smelled as if it came from heaven. I was so ravenous I nearly burst into tears.

‘You’re supposed to drink red wine with duck,’ you told me matter-of-factly. Those were the first words I heard you speak. ‘But I thought white might be better, as it’s the middle of the day.’

‘Who are you?’ I asked, preparing to be angry, hoping I wouldn’t have to be, because I was desperate to eat the food you’d brought. Doherty was watching, as mystified as I was.

‘Robert Haworth. I heard you yelling at that tosser.’ You nodded in the direction of the hot-food counter. ‘He’s obviously never going to give you a lunch that’s edible, so I thought I would.’

‘Do I know you?’ I asked, still mystified.

‘You do now,’ you said. ‘I couldn’t let you starve, could I?’

‘Where did this meal come from?’ There had to be a catch, I thought. ‘Did you cook it yourself?’ What sort of man, I was wondering, hears a stranger wrangling over a bad meal in a service station and rushes home to cook her something better?

‘Not me. It’s from the Bay Tree.’ Spilling’s most expensive bistro. My parents took me there once and our meal, including wine, cost nearly four hundred pounds.

‘So . . .’ I stared at you and waited, making it clear that further explanation was required.

You shrugged. ‘I saw you were in trouble and I wanted to help. I rang the Bay Tree, explained the situation. Put in an order. Then I nipped down in my lorry and picked it up. I’m a lorry driver.’

I thought you must want something from me. I didn’t know what, but I was on my guard. I wasn’t prepared to eat a mouthful, even though my stomach hurt and my mouth was watering, until I’d worked out what your agenda was.

Doherty appeared beside us. There was a large fat stain on his shirt, roughly the shape of Portugal. ‘I’m afraid you can’t—’

‘Leave the lady in peace to eat her lunch,’ you said to him.

‘You’re not allowed to bring food—’

‘
You’re
not allowed to sell food that’s inedible,’ you corrected him. Your tone was quiet and polite throughout, but I wasn’t fooled and neither was Bruce Doherty. We both knew you were going to do something. Astonished, I watched you pick up the plate with the chicken, chips and peas on it. You pulled open the neck of Doherty’s shirt and tipped the food into the space between his uniform and his chest. He made a disgusted noise, halfway between a wail and a groan, looking down at himself. Then he walked unevenly out of the food court, spilling peas from his clothes. Some rolled on the floor in his wake, some he crushed with the soles of his black shoes. I’ll never forget that sight as long as I live.

‘Sorry,’ you said once he’d gone. I had the impression that you’d lost some confidence. You spoke in a more stilted way, and seemed to hunch a little. ‘Look, I just wanted to help,’ you mumbled. You seemed embarrassed, as if you’d decided that bringing me a fancy duck dish from the nearest posh restaurant was a nerdy thing to do. ‘Too many people stand by and do nothing to help people in trouble,’ you said.

Those words changed everything.

‘I know,’ I said forcefully, thinking of the men in dinner suits who had applauded my rapist two years earlier. ‘I’m grateful for your help. And this—’ I pointed at the duck ‘—looks amazing.’

You smiled, reassured. ‘Tuck in, then,’ you said. ‘I hope you enjoy it.’ You turned to leave and I was surprised all over again. I’d assumed that at the very least, you’d stay and talk to me while I ate. But you’d said you were a lorry driver. You were bound to have an urgent delivery, a timetable. You couldn’t afford to waste your whole day hanging around a service station with me. You’d done more than enough for me already.