Little Liar Read online

  ‘Inappropriate,’ said Lori again. ‘Then what?’

  ‘He asked me out.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He did. In Nero. That was my mistake. I shouldn’t have gone. He said he wanted to talk; I didn’t know what about. We went to Nero, one afternoon, after school, and he asked me out.’

  ‘But how did he say it? That is literally the weirdest and creepiest thing I have ever heard,’ said Lori.

  I took a moment to choose my words. It was at about this point that the script began to deviate from actual events – as far as I can remember, Jonah and I never visited a branch of Caffè Nero together – and I wanted to be clear.

  ‘Just that he really liked me, and he wanted to spend more time with me … it was obvious what he meant. He said he’d split up with his girlfriend. I don’t know, by the way, if that was true. I don’t even know if he really had a girlfriend.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I said no, of course.’

  Lori exhaled.

  ‘Then I started seeing him round where I lived. It wouldn’t be hard, would it, to get hold of my address? All he’d have to do was check on the system at school. There must be some kind of database. Oh, he always had a reason for being there, if we actually bumped into each other and said hi – but my area’s a bit dodgy; there’s not a lot going on … And after the second time, the third time … I started feeling like he was definitely, definitely following me. So … I tried something. An experiment. It was a weekend, a Saturday. I was out with my mum, doing a bit of shopping. Tesco, Superdrug, some Christmas presents and stuff. We were on our way home when I saw him again, on the other side of the street, far away but still definitely him: his hairstyle, his clothes. Easy to spot. It was starting to freak me out; I’m not going to lie. He didn’t come up to me, probably because my mum was there. So I said goodbye to my mum, and I walked along the road and crossed the bridge. Then I carried on, along the South Bank, for maybe twenty or thirty minutes. Just walking, same pace, not looking round. Eventually I came to Borough Market. The place was rammed with tourists, vegetable stalls, burger stands, mince pies … I decided that if he was still following me, then it just couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? I kind of weaved my way through the market and came out into this tiny alleyway, empty except for some boxes and recycling bins. It was starting to rain, just a bit; I looked in my bag for my umbrella. That’s when I felt a hand on my shoulder.’

  Lori flinched, with the thrilled empathy of a captive listener. ‘OhmyGod,’ she muttered.

  ‘He was drunk,’ I went on. ‘You can always tell, can’t you. He grabbed me by both arms – properly grabbed me, so that you could see the marks of his fingers even a couple of days later.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘I don’t remember the exact words, but he said something like, “You say Ellen Ripley’s your heroine. You are Ellen Ripley. You’re the bravest girl I’ve ever met. You’re fearless and proud and determined. You’re a survivor. I love the way you touch the tip of your nose when you’re thinking. I love the way your hair is always messy, even when you brush it. I love the way you tilt your head on one side when you’re looking at your work. Both hands … you can draw with both hands. You speak French like it’s English. Being around you makes me feel … electrified, somehow. I just can’t go on without you, Nora.”’

  I judged it wise to stop there. I’d modulated my voice for Jonah’s speech – not so much as to make it a parody, but just enough to give it an authentic gloss that Lori, I was sure, would appreciate. I hated to lapse into clichés, which I’d had to do, but Jonah Trace was not an original thinker.

  ‘Holy Mother of God,’ said Lori. ‘And did he kiss you?’

  ‘He tried,’ I said. ‘I slapped his face. And I ran.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Well, I would have still hoped he’d get the message, you know, and leave me alone. But there was a bunch of girls from Chamber Choir, singing carols on the South Bank. A couple of them saw us, and they reported it at school. After that, of course, I had to tell my form tutor, Sarah Cousins. She asked to see the bruises on my arms. And the texts … he’d sent me dozens and dozens of texts. I still don’t know how he got my number,’ I said, getting up. ‘The system, again, I suppose.’

  12

  The first lie that I remember telling was when I was about four years old. I attended a Montessori school near to where we lived in Paris. In the mornings, there were gentle, creative activities, many of which involved potato-printing; in the afternoons, we were laid out like sausages on mats and encouraged to go to sleep. There was a large mural of a beaming sun in a pork pie hat, from whose head sprouted thick orange rays; the word for HELLO in several languages floated in the clouds around him. A beaten-up piano stood in one corner, and there were low red tables with low red stools, where we did most of our activities. All the other children were French.

  I need to describe an incident that precedes my first remembered lie. It concerns a child called Toby Lenôtre, and took place some weeks beforehand. The activity was finger-painting. We were invited to copy our full names, in different-coloured capital letters, onto long strips of white cloth. These strips of cloth had some further destination, like a wall display or set of flags, but I forget what it was.

  Toby Lenôtre was the kind of child who was always leaking fluids. A ribbon of saliva dangled from his lower lip; snot bubbled permanently from his nose. I think I despised him, in a casual way. I suppose he didn’t like me either, although it surprised me, at the time, to discover this. It wasn’t the most peaceful of mornings, this one: you can imagine the carnage of a dozen ham-fisted children mangling their own names. But it was the kind of task that pleased me. Mme Peruvier, our teacher, had written in front of me – in solid legible capitals – my name: ALIÉNOR TOBIAS, and I’d decided on a basic but satisfying pattern alternating between red, blue, yellow and green paint. Even at an early age, I was a competent planner.

  It just so happened that Toby Lenôtre, he of the leaking fluid, was sitting next to me that day. As was the habit of most of the other children, he was getting more paint on his face than on the strip of cloth in front of him, and I was concentrating on my own creation when I felt a sharp tap on my arm.

  All this took place in French, but I will translate it.

  ‘You’ve stolen my name,’ Toby told me shrilly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  He pointed at the plastic table, where both of our printed names lay side by side:

  TOBIAS LENÔTRE ALIÉNOR TOBIAS

  ‘I have not stolen your name, silly,’ I said. ‘Anyway, your name is Toby.’

  ‘It’s Tobias. You can’t have the same name as me. You have stolen it.’

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Girls can’t have the same names as boys, besides.’

  ‘They can.’

  ‘They can’t. Thief!’

  I imagine this went on for some time. In the end, Mme Peruvier, sensing that Toby’s leakage of fluid would shortly be including tears, moved me onto the other table. I went with her perfectly calmly, and continued my painting. But inside I was really quite rigid with rage, as though a hand were balled tight in my chest.

  A few weeks later, another finger-painting session was taking place. This time, the work-in-progress for each of us was a rainbow, an arc-en-ciel. Around the room various free interpretations were being executed, but I’d learned from my father the seven colours, and although our pots of paint lacked the wherewithal to make both indigo and violet, I was otherwise able to produce a pretty valid example of a rainbow. I was not, incidentally, motivated by wanting to please the teacher, but I did like to get things right.

  Mme Peruvier was surprised to find me suddenly tugging at her sleeve in tears.

  ‘Il a retourné ma feuille,’ I said, with none of my usual calm.

  ‘Mais qui?’

  ‘Toby.’

  My shoulders were shaking; she picked
me up for one of her all-enveloping cuddles, and carried me over to where I had been sitting. Sure enough, my sheet of paper was overturned, and when she peeled it away from the table, all that remained on the page was a smear – the colours I’d taken such pains to render had been merged, mercilessly, into a muddy scar.

  Toby Lenôtre was high-pitched, even hysterical, in his protestations. But there were no witnesses, and where he was given to outbursts of crying and often started petty squabbles or made unfounded accusations, dribbling mucus all the while, I did not. Why should the teacher disbelieve me? I was such a placid, unflappable child. Mme Peruvier’s judgement was swift. Toby was dispatched to his striped mat for the rest of the day in punishment, while I was given a sweet and a fresh sheet of paper.

  I wonder if Toby, wherever he is, ever thinks now of the time he was falsely accused of ruining my rainbow. Maybe he thinks he was guilty. People do, you know. People often remember things wrongly.

  Il a retourné ma feuille.

  My first-born lie, but not my last.

  It was Sarah Cousins who made me remember this, actually.

  It was a Monday afternoon in early February, just before half term. A whole-school swimming gala was taking place at the local pool. Although I was a very good swimmer, I was not competing; I had a bad cold. So instead of being down on the poolside benches, I was up in the gallery with the girls who were having their period, the girls who were using this as an excuse, and Sarah Cousins, who was in charge of us.

  Everyone in my row was working on a Valentine of some kind. Some were hand-tooling poems in silver pens onto black card; others were cutting out red hearts from swatches of velvet. I was not making a Valentine. I had no one to send a card to, even as a gesture.

  ‘Not working on a card, Nora?’ said Sarah Cousins, who was sitting next to me.

  I blew my nose, shaking my head. The decibel level in the pool hall was ear-wreckingly high: the screams, the splashes, the megaphone and the whistles were reflected a hundredfold by the tiled walls. It was nearly impossible to hear my form tutor; really, the conversation was mouthed, more than spoken.

  ‘Not even for Mr Trace?’

  I glanced at her, not sure if I’d heard this correctly.

  She kept her eyes on the swimmers, but her face was angled towards mine; despite the noise, and my cold-congested head, I heard the next bit perfectly.

  ‘See, Nora. I know what you told me, back in December. I know what we went on to discover about Jonah Trace. I saw the marks on your arms, and I read those messages on your phone. But I also know what he told me. We’re mates, me and Jonah. You didn’t know that, did you?’

  I said nothing. Nothing is always safest and best.

  ‘How did your father die, Nora?’

  I opened my mouth. Down in the pool, Lori Dryden – a surprisingly nimble athlete, given her frame – was poised, pigeon-toed, on the diving board.

  ‘He …’

  ‘He disappeared at sea, didn’t he? I’ve heard you saying that, in the past. But that wasn’t what you told Jonah. I think you had better be very, very careful what you make up next.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

  ‘I think you do. You’re very accomplished, Nora. You’re gifted. You have a way with words; you should use it wisely. Now, I’m not saying Jonah wasn’t in the wrong. He absolutely admits that what he did wasn’t right. But I think that the version you gave me, of what you say happened, was untrue. Do I think you’re blameless? No. Not in the slightest. In fact …’

  At last she met my gaze, with Antarctic eyes that drilled without compassion into mine.

  ‘I think you’re a little liar,’ my form tutor said.

  1

  You’d be surprised how few people have ever challenged me. I have a number of theories about why this might be so.

  One: I choose my campaigns – both my adversaries and my battlegrounds – with care. The Trace Incident, as I came to call it in my head, was the only time I have ever called attention to myself in a significant way at school, just as the Ruined Rainbow may have been the most fuss I ever made at my Montessori nursery. That is not to say I hadn’t told lies during my time at Lady Agatha’s, but they were of a lesser, common-or-garden variety, more ingenious in nature perhaps than most other girls’, but minor nonetheless. Bread-and-butter lies. Nothing important.

  Two: I’m five foot two. If you are small and you want to be heard, you need to be loud; I am not. I speak only when spoken to, and I speak quietly. I dress blandly. I find it better to camouflage myself, like a death’s-head moth, than to stand out.

  Three: I have a large, shadowy birthmark, a ‘characterful’ mother, and a father who died in unknown circumstances. This makes me an object of sympathy and pity, and people don’t like to spend too long feeling sorry for other people, if they can avoid it. Thus, for the most part, I pass under the radar.

  Four: I am very, very good at what I do.

  But Ms Sarah Cousins called me a liar, as we sat in the gallery and watched the swimmers.

  Distress, and horror and shame. I felt those, and more, and nothing at all. I had been seen, and not just as I might choose to be seen – a girl with a birthmark and ringlet-curls, small in stature. No: my form tutor had identified and named me.

  I think you’re a little liar.

  Her words were a wasp-sting, quick and lethal.

  I was cold (and rigid, and livid) with rage. In spite of this, I still had enough of a hold on myself to do the correct thing, which was not to react. I sat next to Sarah Cousins and watched the 4x4 relay and the diving. And then, when there was a break, I smiled at her casually and melted away.

  I pushed through the doors at the back of the gallery and came out onto the fire escape. I sat down, folding my arms around my knees, crumpling myself ever-smaller, like a pipe-cleaner doll. I thought of all the different and exciting ways that my form tutor might meet some kind of unhappy fate on her way home. All the poisoned oysters in the world would not do for Ms Sarah Cousins. No: she’d have to be crushed by a herd of rabid elephants, or an errant meteor, or … but it was doing me no good, to dwell on this. I almost felt a smidgen of respect for her, with her sheep’s heart scalpel and her cut-glass voice. I hadn’t seen that one coming at all; otherwise I’d have been prepared for it. I hadn’t known she was a friend of Jonah Trace’s; I hadn’t known he’d have told her so much; I hadn’t known that she would believe him. All the times that I’d been with him, I’d never seen him receive a message or a call from my form tutor. Perhaps they were staffroom buddies. The question was: what exactly had Jonah said to her? And was there – could there possibly be – any proof? A scribbled note, a text I’d forgotten to erase from his inbox? I didn’t think so. But I could have been wrong.

  In the days that followed the swimming gala, the walls of the Agatha Seaford Academy seemed to grow closer and closer together. Everywhere I went, my form tutor’s accusation rumbled inside my ear like ocean sounds in a conch. Sometimes, I heard it so clearly that it was hard to tell what was inside my head and what was outside of it. I started to avoid the eyes of other girls. I cancelled a plan I’d made to go out with Frederika. I stopped going to the dining hall and got into the habit of spending my lunch breaks in the library instead, reading or thinking. I had a favourite space, in the furthest corner from the entrance, rather poorly lit. It was the Russian section, and little used; I liked the privacy of it. And it was there that I was sitting, on the Thursday before the February half term, working on an essay about The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, when I had my first proper encounter with Bel.

  I feel that I will always remember that poem, as a result.

  I’d been working for a while, with some Strepsils and a packet of tissues at my elbow – I was finding it hard to get rid of my cold. I got up to look for some kind of reference book. I forget which. But when I returned to ‘my’ area, I found signs of some other presence. A paper bag from which multi-coloured sweets sp
illed; a can of Coke; a pack of Tarot cards, much-scuffed; a scarf with a print of fairground horses. Disturbed, I moved my things to the very edge of the table, and turned my chair towards the bookcases. This person was violating library code, and I did not want their chaos to contaminate what I intended to be an absorbing forty minutes contemplating poetry.

  ‘All right, love?’ came a voice.

  ‘Hush,’ hissed the librarian from her desk.

  I looked up guardedly. It was the girl, Annabel, she of the outlandish clothing and twenty-four-hour play, and the three oil paintings, from the year above me. Was she talking to me? She sat down noisily, not looking at me, and I wondered whether she had been talking to herself. Sweets rattled to the floor like loose teeth. From her enormous bag, she pulled a sheaf of papers covered in green writing. These she began sorting through with an intolerable rustling sound. I looked down at my English file and pretended to read, but in my distress I was unable to do more than reread the same lines over and over again. Now Annabel was sending a text from her phone – another violation – and it was not even on silent; assorted beeps and clicks punctuated her other noises, and I found myself tensing up from the pain of it.

  I would have to leave; there was nothing else to be done. The English could wait for another time. Now she was thumping books down in front of her: thump, thump, thump. Why did the librarian not come over to silence her? I would have done it myself, but I am not a confrontational person. I could not even bring myself to look in her direction. I was about to get up and go; I had got as far as squaring my books and zipping my pencil case in readiness when I realised pathetically that I had nowhere else to be. I didn’t want to go to the lunch hall. Nor could I go to the form room, because Sarah Cousins would probably go there after lunch, to do her marking and make herself available for meaningful chats. I fancied (although it might well have been paranoia) that my three obligatory friends were less fond of me than they’d used to be, since the Trace Incident, so there was no point in going to find them.