Little Liar Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Also by Julia Gray

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One: The Trace Incident

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Two: The Belle of the Ball

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Three: Jacaranda

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Four: Picture People

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Acknowledgements

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

  Andersen Press Limited

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.andersenpress.co.uk

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

  The right of Julia Gray to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Text copyright © Julia Gray, 2018

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  ISBN 9781787611245

  Also by Julia Gray

  The Otherlife

  ‘Gripping, bold and completely original’

  Katherine Rundell

  ‘A bold, original and engrossing collision between the Norse gods and our high-pressured school system. I love books about gods in modern times and this one had me gripped. An auspicious debut’

  Francesca Simon

  ‘A big, mysterious book full of dangerous characters and half glimpsed truths. An absorbing and unusual read. I loved it’

  Melvin Burgess

  ‘Stunning … a searing satire on the pressures that privileged children are put under by pushy parents’

  Amanda Craig, New Statesman

  ‘Grand and gripping’

  Literary Review

  ‘Truly marvellous’

  INIS

  ‘Intelligent and insightful … Perfect for fans of Sarah Govett and Neil Gaiman’

  Anna McKerrow, BookTrust

  My name is Nora Tobias. I am seventeen years old. I’ve noticed that this is how stories often begin: a name, an age. The formula seems safe enough. I am a quarter English, a quarter Scottish and half French. I’m on the short side. I have a birthmark that covers the upper left portion of my face. My father used to say that it looked like a map of France, and my mother that it was a squished starfish.

  I live with my mother, whose name is Evie, on the eighth floor of a tower block on a housing estate in South London. We have lived there for nearly ten years. My mother works freelance for the costume departments of different television companies. She is a reformed Goth: her hair is no longer bottle-black-and-blue, but her ears are still pierced in eleven places. There is nothing she doesn’t know about corsets.

  My father’s name was Felix. He came from a small village in Normandy, and he died when I was six. I remember certain things about him very well. Other things, not so well at all. He had dark hair. Green eyes. He was of medium height. His thoughtful voice barely broke the surface of a whisper; everything he said was accentuated with hand gestures, soft but precise. An artist and illustrator, who worked mostly with watercolour and pencil, he did commissions for books and magazines. Everything he drew was careful, meticulous, never coloured outside the edges he marked with such certainty. My mother seemed loud and chaotic by comparison, I recall, although she does not seem that way to me any longer.

  I wonder what else would be appropriate to mention.

  My early childhood was spent in Paris. After my father’s death, Evie and I came to England. We lived in London, but went often to Glasgow, to visit my newly-widowed grandmother. But if ever a home appears in my dreams, it’s not our Paris apartment, or the one where Evie and I live now, or Nana’s old rose-covered bungalow, before she moved a year or so ago into sheltered housing. I see the little cottage near a Normandy beach, where I spent many childhood summers. This is the place I associate most with my father.

  At present, I am staying with my Aunt Petra, who is not my aunt at all, but a lifelong friend of Evie’s. The name ‘Petra’, she tells me, means rock, but there is nothing rock-like about my non-aunt, who is as curved and soft as candyfloss. She runs a guesthouse here, in the Scottish Highlands, with her husband Bill. People come to relax, and meditate and heal. They walk beside the lochs that lie on either side of the peninsula; they learn about Thai food and how to build walls. I’ve been here a fortnight or so, but I’ve learned none of those things. There are six other guests, and mostly we keep ourselves to ourselves. Two people are doing a silent retreat, which makes for minimal interaction. Another guest, with whom I’m now on quite friendly terms, is recuperating after an accident. The rest are yoga devotees.

  It’s July, not that you can tell; every day dawns uniformly grey, and the rain cycles from a spatter to a thundery relentlessness. When the sun does come out, it does so apologetically, like a ballerina who is unsure of her entrance on stage. I do not mind the weather. The climate suits me.

  Aunt Petra is keen for me to take part in classes and workshops: T’ai Chi, for example, or Spiritual Healing (this one, she feels, might be especially appropriate). Each morning, over porridge resembling wet sand in colour and texture, she tries to sign me up. Each morning, I decline. I came to Scotland for peace and silence, not to participate in her Organised Wellness. However, I do quite often agree to take her dog, Oscar, for a walk. He purports to be a Jack Russell, but there’s a touch of Rat somewhere in his heritage, I’m sure. As long as it isn’t raining too hard, Oscar and I wander through fields thick with stubby nettles, beating pathways down to the loch; or else we follow one of the narrow tracks that crisscross through woodland to the top of the peninsula, passing isolated farms and small rivers, until we reach one of the nearby villages. And then it begins to rain harder, and we wait for a bus to take us back.

  Sometimes, I wonder why Aunt Petra, with all her talk of Zen and just-being and mindfulness, isn’t more content to let me do nothing. Perhaps it’s because the state of doing nothing, of thinking and feeling nothing, is allegedly hard to attain but I already excel at it. I don’t really know what she’s thinking when she enquires, like clockwork, about my plans for the day. Perhaps it is simply part of her repertoire, essentially without meaning.

  This morning, I made an announcement. I don’t know who was more surprised, Aunt Petra or me.

  ‘I’m going to write,’ I said.

  Aunt Petra paused at the breadboard. ‘To … to what, love? To light?’

  ‘Write,’ I said.

  ‘Poems? Fairy tales?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  She couldn�
��t have been more pleased. Before I knew it, Bill was bringing in an old sewing table with a missing foot, like a lame calf, and setting up a computer with a yellowed keyboard and arthritic mouse.

  ‘What about your wounded arm?’ Petra said, looking down at the bandage that hid the savage purple scar on which all her lotions and potions had had little effect. I said I’d go slowly, which was very much my intention, and see how it felt. She should have guessed that I didn’t mind pain.

  So here I am, with time, as well as potions, on my hands.

  I have never tried to write anything before. I’m more of a reader; I don’t like to commit myself to the page. I’d rather judge others for what they have chosen to commit. There’s a daunting finality to writing. Even though I am working on a computer, and hardly carving quill-ink letters onto leathery parchment, even though I can delete and redo to my heart’s content, the words still glower darkly from the screen. We are finished articles, they say. We are evidence. We can be used against you. In their straight-line sentences, they form a solemn procession, like ants plodding towards a cliff edge. They look ‘right’: that’s one of the problems with typed words. I think I am scared of that, and of what may be used against me.

  Because this is no fairy tale.

  It is almost, for want of a better word, a confession. I’d say ‘memoir’, only that conjures something more grown-up than this, something less messy. I quite like the word chronicle. What I mean to set out is a series of events – perhaps not always strictly in chronological order, because my memories aren’t arranged in such a linear way – at which I was present.

  I want to explain what I did, and with whom. And where, and when and why. What happened, and what happened next.

  The Chronicles of Nora, if you like.

  And it will be a true story.

  What will become quickly apparent is that I have not always told the truth before. To put it another way: I have told a number of lies. Some of them have been small, and some of them have been significant. I am writing this now because the lies I have told have resulted in some bad things. Whether I think I shall lessen my guilt through the act of setting things down, or whether I think I will be able to make sense of what has happened by so doing, I am not quite sure.

  Aunt Petra is delighted with this pursuit. Already, a Do Not Disturb sign hangs outside my door. Only Oscar comes in from time to time, to rub his rodenty fur against my ankle.

  I am growing familiar with these ancient keys, and it is appropriate that they are keys, I keep thinking, because something is being unlocked. And although sometimes I think this will drive me mad – the endless, oppressive silence, the rain, the view of the loch through my window – a small part of me knows that what will really drive me mad is if I let this go unwritten.

  So here are my hands, at a keyboard. Here is an open document. And here, at my elbow, is an envelope on which I have scribbled, in pencil, a kind of shape.

  A timeline, with loops and bends.

  A map for me to follow.

  I would like to start in January.

  1

  Evie and I spent Christmas as we always did, watching movies of the lushly-orchestrated, black-and-white variety, and dozing, she on the sofa, me on the rug, by the twinkling lights of the tree. We snacked on things: banana chips, peanut butter from the jar. On Christmas Day, we ate macaroni cheese with mushrooms and peas, spooned directly out of the dish. Evie talked about mending the leaking tap in the bathroom, replacing the shower curtain; such talk was strictly traditional. We visited the neighbours. After living on the same estate for a decade, we had forged a cluster of good friendships with the people nearby, like elderly Mrs DeAndrade.

  My mother, a genuine workaholic, makes a real effort around the festive season to indulge in the kind of prolonged, companionable mother-daughterness that might evade us at other times. This Christmas was no exception. We played Scrabble, which I won consistently, and Gin Rummy, which she won intermittently. We went for manicures at the local nail bar; we both had a great love for things being done to our hands. On New Year’s Eve, we sat on our balcony and watched the fireworks blooming over the river, each of us with a mug of hot chocolate. Once, Evie would have had red wine in a tumbler, or an inch of Amaro – a bitter liqueur – in a glassful of ice, but not any longer.

  I suppose it must have been January the second or third. It was a Monday. The spring term was not due to start until the middle of the week. Evie was just beginning to clear the crumpled wrapping paper from the corners of the living room, to tweak open the curtains; she was talking about her upcoming projects; she was sketching with her left hand while she watched TV. Clear signs that the holiday was coming to a close. One of the main differences between me and my mother is that she has the ability to look forward to things; I don’t. There was nothing to look forward to at school. Being there, in those cramped, corridored buildings made me feel like I was acting in a play but didn’t know the script.

  My school, the Agatha Seaford Academy, named after Lady Agatha Seaford, who had endowed it, was for girls only. It was known colloquially as Lady Agatha’s and was one of the best state schools in the borough. To get in you had to be religious; we weren’t, but we jumped through the holy hoops all right (church on Sundays for a year, Evie hiding her pierced tongue) and I did well in the entrance exams, so they let me in. The grounds, not far from Pimlico, were packed with once-shiny facilities, and a chapel to which we went daily. The teachers – called, unusually, by both first name and surname – were an approachable, professional bunch. There were well-run, though uninspired, after-school clubs and societies with which I could have liberally filled my free time, if I’d wanted to; as it was, I went to only one, and that turned out not to have been a good idea.

  My chosen A-level subjects were Art and Design, English Literature and French. The obvious ones; the ones I didn’t have to try in. I had always been pretty fluent in my father’s language, though lack of practice made me careless with my pronouns, while English and Art came easily to me. But just because I found my choices easy doesn’t mean to say I was enjoying myself.

  While my mother began stripping the tree of its shiny ornamentation (this year we had gone for a footwear theme, and from the thorny branches hung tiny stilettos, clumpy boots, hot-pink ballerina slippers), I felt my usual rush of envy for the passion she had for her work. Evie lived inside her passion: our flat was papered with clippings and costume ideas. In the shifting histories of fabrics and patterns, my mother had found a kind of temple of grace. Without it, in so many ways, she would have been lost. I had no such temple.

  ‘When do you start back at work?’ I asked her.

  ‘Friday. Costume drama,’ she said in her patchwork accent (part Essex, part Glasgow), and full-mouthed. I looked over; she had a piece of Sellotape between her teeth. I rolled myself up from the floor and went over to help her. We unhooked the shoes, bundled them in tissue paper and packed them, appropriately enough, into shoe boxes, even though by the following year my mother would have come up with a different theme, and we would have no more use for the shoes.

  ‘What period?’

  ‘Tudor. They think people don’t know about anything but the Twenties and the Tudors.’ This came out with her usual soft disdain: Evie longed for lesser-known eras to be brought to life on the screen.

  ‘These are nice,’ I said, holding up some red-and-white trainers made of papier-mâché. ‘I’d wear these.’

  Evie grinned. Although – as I have said before – she is a reformed, rather than committed Goth, she still likes to dress in monochrome; that morning she had on a lace camisole, a cream silk shirt with an ink stain blossoming over one breast, a man’s grey cardigan with several buttons missing and a long black skirt with a side split. She still had that vampiric whiteness you expect in Goths; her skin was so icily pale it was almost blue in places. Lady Agatha’s had no uniform in the Sixth form so I modelled my own clothing for school on Evie’s monochrome style, often borrowi
ng things that fitted me, although I preferred camouflage to costume. In point of fact, I would not have worn red-and-white trainers. It was a lie, albeit a small one, designed to please Evie.

  I could pause this frame so happily. Although not a particularly emotional person, I catch a glimpse of Evie at odd moments like this one, when we are both on the pine-needled carpet with our hands full of hooks and tissues, absorbed in the process of dismantling Christmas, and I am replete with simple gratitude. I am grateful, you see, that my mother is still alive. She might so easily not have been.

  But I cannot pause the frame. Because the phone is about to ring, and the sound of it will shatter the cocktail of tree, hooks, carpet and gratitude that I have assembled so temptingly for myself. And there is nothing I can do about it. I cannot stop the phone from ringing.

  2

  Evie picked up the phone in her room, only because she had gone there to fetch more shoe boxes a fraction of a second beforehand. If she had picked it up in the living room (the only other place where there was a handset), I’d have absorbed, at least on our side, part of the conversation. As it was, I had no idea what was taking place. I carried on undecorating the Christmas tree, pump by sandal, wondering what to have for lunch, ruling out various options as they occurred to me. Sushi: too cold; a sandwich: too dull.

  ‘Aliénor.’

  Just as I seldom call Evie ‘Mum’, she rarely calls me the name she and my father chose for me. Laid-back and accepting to a fault, she unquestioningly embraced my acquisition of Nora. Everyone, said Evie, has the right to rechristen themselves, to pick a name that resonates truly. She herself has always hankered after ‘Elvira’. She stood in the doorway to the living room, holding the BT handset; for a moment, I thought someone had called for me.

  ‘That was your headmistress on the phone,’ said Evie. ‘Mrs Bane.’

  ‘Braine.’

  ‘Braine. She wants us to come in. Both of us. Tomorrow. Before term starts.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘What about?’

  ‘She didn’t say. It concerns a member of staff, apparently. What’s she mean? What’s happened?’