After the Lie: A gripping novel about love, loss and family secrets (4 page)

Sean had the flippant delivery of the super-confident that kept me on my guard in case I took him seriously when he was joking. I glanced back towards school. They weren’t photos to examine in broad daylight, outside the cosy cocoon of his room. He flicked through them. ‘This is my favourite.’ I looked down at Sean’s hands cupping my breasts, embarrassed by how small they looked in the photo.

He gathered them up, pursing his lips and patting his pocket. ‘Where’s the last one? We took six, didn’t we?’

‘Do you think you’ve dropped it?’ I tried to sound nonchalant, but my voice was already thin with fright.

‘Nah. Should think it’s in my bag somewhere. I only put them in my blazer at lunch.’

‘No one else has seen them, have they?’

A flicker of a frown passed over Sean’s face. Then he shrugged and kissed my nose. ‘Course not. I’m not sharing you with anyone.’

I wanted to run back to school, to have him empty out his bag, to reassure me that our secret was safe. But he’d already made a couple of ‘Well, you’re only thirteen’ comments when I’d been shocked at things he’d done with his friends – drinking on the dunes, nicking sweets from Woolworths, banging the machines in the amusement arcades to make the coins rattle out. I didn’t dare say anything more and turned my attention to not being late for Maths with the terrifying Mr Ashcombe. I was trying to hurry without Sean noticing. He was hell-bent on dawdling back, blasé, even though he was in my dad’s French class straight after lunch. In the end, the fear of Mr Ashcombe shouting at me in front of everyone was too strong. I needed to fetch my books from my locker, so I raced on ahead.

When I emerged back out into the playground, my dad was disappearing into his class as the second bell rang for the start of lessons. So he wouldn’t catch me cutting it fine to get to class on time, I hung back behind a pillar a few yards away. I watched him open his textbook, then pick up something inside it and study it closely. I was just about to duck past when Sean strolled round the corner.

He winked as he opened the classroom door. ‘Back to mine after school, yeah?’

I nodded, a little shiver of anticipation running through me.

Then it all happened so quickly. A great roar of fury from inside. Sean flying out with Dad chasing after him, clutching something in his hand. Dad reaching Sean. Thrusting something square at him. A photo. The one Sean couldn’t find. The last one, when we’d been confident and carried away. When we’d stopped laughing when the self-timer went off. When we’d worked out how to balance the camera on a pile of LPs and tilt it at an angle so the picture got our whole bodies in. Where Sean had one hand on my breast and another spreading my legs.

The only photo where you could see
everything
.

There was a pause. Then Dad’s cufflinks glittering in the May sunshine, the tie with the school crest flapping back over his shoulder, the crack as he drove his fist into Sean’s face. Sean grunting and buckling over. Dad’s foot, clad in a highly polished shoe, making contact with Sean’s ribs. A shout. Mr Shaw, our pale Geography teacher, scattering papers as he ran. Sean on the floor, curled up, hands covering his head. Mr Shaw’s thin fingers clawing onto Dad’s arm.

The disbelief on Dad’s face.

On everybody’s.

E
ven now
, my feeling of terror could reignite, like trick candles on a birthday cake.

My mother’s voice took on a rasping harshness. ‘I didn’t want you to be forever etched in people’s minds as the girl who was stupid enough to let
a boy
photograph her private parts.’ She managed to say ‘
a boy
’ as though I’d run into the street and jiggled an array of body parts at the first male clutching a Polaroid camera.

After all these years, I still didn’t know how to seal her words in. If ever the phrase ‘to have your say’ took on a human form, I was quite sure it would look like my mother, knotting scarves with precision and terrifying clothes into hanging without creases.

And she was off, as ferocious and determined as the mothers in the egg-and-spoon race on sports day. ‘I can’t believe you trusted him not to show the photos to his friends. What did you think he was going to do with them?’

Treasure them as a memento of how much I loved him, not boast about them to Nigel Graves, the captain of the rugby team and all-round alpha male.

I could feel my throat ache with the strain of not shouting. I managed to say, quite calmly, ‘We’ve been through this. Hundreds of times. If I could live my life over again, of course, I wouldn’t have done it, but I can’t change what happened.’

My mother was ripping up little shreds of doily.

I took a sip of tea. ‘Obviously it was naïve to think it would never catch up with us. I’ll tackle Sean. In the meantime, don’t come down to the school, at least not with Dad.’ I got up and put my hand on her shoulder. She shrugged me off. ‘Try not to get in a conversation with Sean if you see him.’

‘I don’t think he’ll recognise me. He only saw me once or twice. You always went to his, remember?’

And frankly,
why
wouldn’t I have done? Sean’s mum, Margie, had made me so welcome with her relaxed ways, her ‘Staying for tea?’ No one stayed for tea at my house without a good month’s notice and my mother huffing and puffing about what hard work it was catering for extra guests. I loved going to Sean’s house where we could walk out of the bottom of the garden, over the dunes and onto the beach. Where we’d spent hours, skimming pebbles on the water, daring each other to paddle in the creek on freezing February days. Sometimes Sean would drop the rugby player bravado and make a little heart out of cockles, a razor shell for an arrow. Those six months were the happiest of my life. Even the cool girls squiggled along to make room for me on the bench in the dining hall. No wonder I’d been drawn to Sean and his cosy house, with its piles of magazines, plates of cakes and yes, damn it, that big bedroom of his where his mother seemed not to care that we emerged rumpled, smudged and flushed.

Thankfully, before my mother could really hit her stride, Jamie strolled through the door, flicking his dark fringe out of his eyes with the studied cool-dudeness of a sixteen-year-old.

‘Hello, Grandma. Didn’t know you were going to be here.’

Jamie sounded as though he’d been promised a bacon sandwich, then opened the fridge to find a spinach and watercress salad. In turn, my mother was finding it difficult to smile as she was too busy making a mental list of things she didn’t like about my son’s appearance. Top button undone, tie too far down, dark curly hair in need of a good cut, blazer sleeves rolled up and, new for today, a rip in his trouser knee. Eventually, she managed to crinkle her lips into an upward motion. ‘Jamie. I just popped in. Must be going anyway.’

I got up to help him lug in his school paraphernalia – his kitbag, boot bag and rucksack – all as heavy as a small wardrobe. Impulsively, I planted a little kiss on the nape of his neck and he squirmed away.

‘Mum! Off!’ He batted me away, eyes glued to his phone as though the world was a bonfire of information he needed to contain.

He was lucky I hadn’t scooped him into a full-blown body hug. I was desperate to cuddle him close, to make certain that if this precarious house of cards blew down, whirling debris and detritus around every corner of our lives, that he knew that I loved him. That I hadn’t set out to be a rubbish mother, the subject of derision at the school gates.

Izzy slammed through the door, her long blonde hair coming loose from her ponytail and her skirt rolled up way too high.

‘Hi, Grandma.’

My mother found anything other than ‘Hello’ repellent unless it was on a Scrabble board. A small cloud scudded across her features. Izzy ignored her and ran over to whisper something in my ear. I could almost hear the squeak of my mother’s disapproving eyebrow.

‘Izzy, don’t whisper. It’s rude,’ I said, without conviction.

She giggled and looked over at Jamie. ‘I know who fancies Jamie.’

Right on cue, his phone beeped. He glanced down. A smile, secret and satisfied, flicked across his face before he narrowed his eyes at Izzy. ‘Yeah, right. Who’s gonna tell you anything?’

‘I heard her talking about you in the lunch queue.’

‘Shut up, dickhead.’

‘Jamie! Do not speak to your sister like that.’ I was clinging onto the hope that my mother might still be rooted in Famous Five land and think ‘dick’ was short for Richard.

Jamie marched off to the fridge. My mother gazed after him. I felt my teeth clench as I waited for the ‘He needs a proper meal, young people think eating’s a movable feast’ conversation. My mother shuddered so dramatically that her necklace rattled as Jamie swigged directly out of the milk carton.

‘So anything happen today at school?’ I’d show my mother that we were a happy, chatty family.

‘No.’

‘Did you play rugby?’

‘Yeah.’

Honestly. If my mother sucked her face in any more she’d look like she’d swallowed her teeth. I willed Jamie to be a bit bloody cooperative.

‘Did you score any tries?’

‘Yeah.’ Suddenly Jamie perked up. ‘There was a dad taking photos. He said I’d played really well. He’s really cool. I think he got one of me sprinting to the touchline. Can we buy it?’

‘No!’

The momentary connection faded away like a dodgy Wi-Fi signal.

‘All right. Calm down, Kermit. Just asking.’

‘Sorry. You’re right. Let me think about it.’

I glanced at my mother. Her eyebrows shot up.

The secret contaminated another generation.

O
ver the next week
, the idea of emigrating consumed me. Somewhere vast. Not somewhere like Britain where sixty million inhabitants trapped in a mere 94,000 square miles led to people you never wanted to see again strolling into your life and turning it upside down. I Googled Canada, America, steppes of Outer Mongolia. Then more sensibly, Northumberland, Cornwall and Pembrokeshire.

Mark laughed and asked me if I was having a midlife crisis as I listed the benefits of starting somewhere new and isolated. ‘Never saw you as a rural tree-hugger type. You never even want to take me to Norfolk for a weekend. Go and rent a caravan somewhere for a week if you need a change of scene.’

My sudden desire to live in the middle of a moor wasn’t at the top of Mark’s priority list anyway. Since a shop that fitted new kitchen unit fronts had opened in the high street, Mark was spending a lot of evenings adding up columns of ever-diminishing figures over and over again, then doodling diamonds on the corner of his notebook. We could have lived worry-free in a house my mother wouldn’t have approved of, with the kids at a school she would have disdained. But I’d adopted her priorities for so long as part of the post-apocalypse appeasement process, Mark would think I was lying if I tried to convince him otherwise.

I was working harder than ever. In-between sourcing a skull-shaped wedding favour basket to hold Liquorice Allsorts, I dodged email communications from Melanie, asking me to contact Sean to sort out the photography. I kept fobbing her off with my work commitments. I refused to go to the school at all, not even to pick up the kids when it was raining. I was still waiting for the magical day when I would wake up with the determination to confront Sean. More often than not, I spent nights blinking into the darkness. Many times, I wanted to shake Mark awake, whisper my worries into his chest, have him shrug and say, ‘That was all so long ago. It’s okay now.’

But it could never really be okay. Every time Dad sank into one of his dark depressions was a reminder of that.

A memory I didn’t know I still had squeezed out. A little image of Mark lifting my chin shortly before we got married, staring into my eyes and saying, ‘You’re so self-contained, Lyddie. What secrets are you keeping from me?’ He said it with a smile, but I caught a note of genuine enquiry.

I’d squirmed from his gaze, batting him away with ‘Me? What secrets would someone like me have? Reading thrillers is about as exciting as I get.’ Then I kissed him until he wasn’t thinking about my secrets, and the racing in my heart dissipated in his solid embrace.

Would he remember that? Would he care? Would he forgive me? I just didn’t know.

The more I tried to second-guess Mark’s reaction, the more I could only imagine domestic Armageddon, the dividing of marital assets. I found it hard to envisage him accepting the news without an accompanying sea change. Far easier to conjure up a picture of me ensconced in a single bed, without the warmth Mark radiated, without him sleepily pushing away the freezing feet I tried to tuck under his calves.

Fortunately, Mark was preoccupied with his business and seemed oblivious to the effort it was costing me to carry on as usual. Living with a little jump of apprehension became my new normal. Every time the phone went, or Mark said, ‘I bumped into...’, or ‘Guess who I met today?’, my heart fizzed as though life as we knew it was about to be ripped away.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I would phone Sean and ask to meet him.

Today I’d agreed to help Mark in the shop with a woman who had several rental properties requiring kitchen modernisation.

‘I really need this contract. And you, darling wife, are much better at winning their trust than me. Your ability to flog a solid oak butcher’s block is just one of your many qualities.’

During the fifteen-minute drive to the shop, we hatched a cunning plan on how to reel the woman in. ‘Let’s offer her a free spice rack if she goes for solid oak. Get her to go for the Corian work surfaces. The margins are higher on them.’

By the time she arrived, it was all I could do not to pounce on her the second she walked through the door, shouting, ‘We really need this! Please.’

Instead of flinging myself on her, we shook hands.

‘Katya Sandstead. Hello.’

There was something so Meg Ryan-ish about her that I did a double-take. A pointed little elfin face and a purple woolly dress over black snakeskin-print leggings. I sat her down and made notes on what she wanted: a refit for her own kitchen, plus two refurbishments of houses she and her husband rented out.

I gave her the tour of the showroom. I pointed out a steam oven. ‘This is top of the range, but it depends how high-end you want to go.’

‘My husband targets corporate rentals, so nothing too cheap.’

I began to relax as she started asking about the length of installation and whether penalty clauses were written into the contract. Within minutes, she had notched herself up into the serious punter category. Mark drew up a time frame, enough work to keep him going for the next three months. He was struggling to rein in his grin as he pulled out samples of wood and swapped colours around.

Katya tapped the pale oak. ‘I really like that. It will be you installing it, won’t it? My husband wants the main man on the job, though it will be me overseeing the work.’

Mark’s eyes almost did a cartoon character cash register ‘ker-ching’. ‘We’ve just installed that oak in the headmaster’s kitchen at Eastington House. Looks absolutely gorgeous. Contemporary but clean.’

Katya grinned. ‘My daughter is at Eastington House. Perhaps I’ll ask him if I can go and have a little look.’

I leapt on the Eastington House association. First rule of selling: create a bond. ‘Our children are there too. Which year?’

‘Eleanor has just started in Year Eleven. Not an ideal time to change schools, but we’ve just moved back from the States.’

‘My son is in that year. I’ll have to ask him if he knows an Eleanor Sandstead.’

‘I kept my maiden name. So damn old by the time I got married, I couldn’t be bothered to adopt a new surname. My daughter’s surname is McAllister. Have you come across her?’