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Authors: Rebecca Whitney

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BOOK: The Liar's Chair
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Again I slip into a half-sleep and see the dead man sitting on the steps of a caravan, drinking from a can. He wears the scruffy blue coat he died in and oversized trainers with the laces
undone. Dressed as I remember him. I’m at the caravan too, we laugh together like old friends. My mother is inside. She collects his things into a pile and pours ink over them. I ask the man
if I should let anyone know he’s dead or if, like me, he wants to disappear. He doesn’t answer but carries on drinking, watching me over the top of the can.

Next time when I wake, I sit up and turn the light on, and rifle through my bedside drawer for some more codeine which I press out of their foil pouches. I wash the pills down with wine from the
now half-full bottle. This bed is where I came the day of the accident, to this same cocoon of warmth where the universe shrinks to the clutter of my mind, like the small dark spaces I would seek
out as a child when I fantasized I was a cat finding somewhere safe and secret, pretending to go through a hole the size of my whiskers. The hiding place would help to block out the noise in my
head, and make the memories go away. But I’ve forgotten the old ways of fooling myself that nothing can touch me. Instead I’ve cultivated a blank space.

I remember the smells and sounds in the bedroom the night after the accident: the smoke seeping into the room even though the windows were shut, footsteps outside on gravel, the sound of the
engine firing up filtering into my dream as my car was driven away. What surprised me – apart from David involving someone else in the equation – was that he knew who to call to make
something as big as a car disappear. He knew the routine in an instant: to clean everything, and burn what couldn’t be restored. No mean feat for a mere businessman. Knowing David as I do, I
imagine this new avenue for his talents has yet to be exhausted.

At the time it had been something of a relief to know that David was dealing with the aftermath of the accident, and that he approved of my hiding the body; no dysfunctional marriage exposed by
an unhappy businesswoman, no messy drink-driving manslaughter case. We don’t do scandals in this house. Nothing to interfere with business.

We have a crime number from the police after we reported the vehicle stolen. They found the car near London and informed us it had been torched. David likes certainty, he takes pride in being
able to plot my mood and actions, and in the past that’s always worked; he’s set upon my emotional blips with a keen, clinical force, and I relied on his ability to give me boundaries
and shut me down. It made me safe. Now something new has passed between us, a mistrust. What’s occurred is bigger than anything we’ve encountered before: a death, plus tonight’s
public humiliation in front of the kind of people David cares about impressing the most. These are errors I’ve seemingly courted. He’ll be wary of me now, unable to compute the future
he’s so painstakingly nurtured over the years. I’m a malfunctioning satellite spiralling away from the mother ship. If he can’t turn me around, he’ll switch off and cut me
loose. I sense the looming threat of David’s distrust. If he can’t bring me into line there is nowhere I can disappear to that will be far enough away. Before, the penalties were only
ever emotional, but it feels like something in me has broken and the old ways of settling things will no longer work.

I light another cigarette and roll the burning tip up and down my arm, seeing how long I can hold it in place before it singes my skin.

PART TWO
6
TEN WRAPS

David’s supply is running low. He wouldn’t call himself an addict, that would be below someone of his stature – dirty – but he uses nearly every day,
apart from the small coke holidays of a week or two here and there to prove to himself he can take it or leave it. He keeps his habit hidden, therefore tidy, therefore respectable. In his eyes, the
line he snorts in the morning gets him ready for the day and sharpens his wits, and the little and often he takes until close of business maintains this tempo. The paraphernalia of his habit
– mirror, vial, silver coke straw, fine metal razor blade – are locked in a drawer of his desk at the office, and I’ve never known him, since the days he started to dabble at
university, to share his supply or to admit to anyone other than me that he uses. That would be a defeat. Drugs are not recreational, they are business.

I buy for David. It’s always been that way, right from the early days when I knew someone in student halls who supplied, and since then we haven’t found a system that better
maintains his privacy. David wouldn’t sully himself to transact with persons of a lesser financial status, but it’s OK for me. The higher up the food chain we go, the more risk I take,
but if David is ever concerned, I insist the job is better done this way – with fewer levels involved in the process, it’s safer. Besides, I tell him I meet a man who knows a man. He
doesn’t know I go to the source. David won’t ask for names, he wants to know as little about the process as is necessary, and that way he maintains his elevation above the grime. If I
got caught in the wrong company, David’s inspector friend in the force ought to be able to pull a few strings. I suspect David has other contacts now who could easily hook him up with a
regular supply, but he likes to keep his personal tastes concealed; a need is the same as a flaw, and you never know who might want to trade on that weakness at a later date. And anyway, I’ve
always had a talent for sniffing out scumbags. Each time a source gets arrested, goes underground or joins NA, I slum it in the pubs of a different town: car parked round the corner, dress code
trashy, hang out long enough on a bar stool – it’s amazing what you get offered. The irony is I’ve only ever tried the stuff once, and the result was a teeming paranoia instead of
the expected exhilaration; an outpouring of all I keep wrapped up inside. Never again. Booze, and lots of it, is good enough for me.

It’s a once-a-month trip to the dealer, to Will on the coast, to top up David’s supply. I’ve been buying from Will for a couple of years and sleeping with him for most of that
time. Even though we usually do the deal at his house, last night was only the second time I’d stayed over, the first being the night before the accident four weeks ago. That all-nighter
ended in such calamity it’s incredible I decided to chance it again, but these days I seem to attract chaos, or perhaps it’s a courtship, and since the accident a part of me has given
up and is throwing itself over to fate. Plus, more recently, there are only a couple of things that settle the constant buzz of dread that circulates my body: one of them is alcohol and the other
is Will.

It’s 9.00 a.m. when I wake and I should have left hours ago, before dawn, before David realized I wasn’t in our bed at home. I’ve been on my best behaviour since the dinner
party, and have been back to my usual self at the office so David believes his authoritarian regime is working, but my absence last night will reverse all of that. I have a loose excuse – a
meeting I’d engineered at the Grand yesterday afternoon, and a room on my credit card with a receipt to show – but I should have called to let him know. If I’d heard his voice it
would have panicked me home so I chanced it, the alcohol fuelling my bravado, and now I’ll have to pay.

I settle into an armchair in Will’s front room – my head thick with sleep and last night’s whisky – as the figure of the man pacing the country lane replays in my brain.
Crash
against my windscreen. I no longer squeeze my eyes shut or hold my head in my hands; the images will keep coming no matter what I do. Sometimes, if I’m lucky and I wake from a
dreamless sleep, it takes a few seconds to recall the source of the disquiet, and then
boom
, back it comes, barrelling into me. From my bag I take the packet of diazepam and knock back a
pill with some water from a half-finished glass on the floor. A noise of clanking cups and cutlery comes from the kitchen, plus Will whistling through his teeth to the buzz of the radio, but
I’m not ready to face him yet.

This room is full of furniture, so many pieces it’s hard to manoeuvre in the space. Mostly they are finds from skips and junk shops, pieces that other people have done away with, and for
good reason. But to Will they are special: mismatched chairs in swirly granny fabrics, a 1960s sideboard with chunky knobs, a coffee table made of orange wood and glass – items that are
vaguely kitsch, but not vintage enough for good taste. An old jukebox sits in one corner, not the cool American diner variety with curved edges and illuminated plastic, but late 1970s with sides of
tan plastic and a playlist featuring the Darts and Showaddywaddy. The paper song-listing is crinkled with mildew. By the time Will found the machine the rain had already got in and it didn’t
work – it never will – but he doesn’t mind or even want to fix the thing. He’s saved it to give it a place to while out the years, like a horse gone to pasture.

In pride of place on the mantelpiece is an antique clock: dark wood, ugly pre-deco glass face that opens for winding; a job Will never forgets even when hung-over. His grandmother left it to him
and he believes it’s valuable, but there are heaps of these same timepieces clogging up the windows of charity shops. The heavy clunk of the clock’s tick fills the room with stasis, but
the feeling is one of containment and safety. As long as I don’t think about leaving. And as long as I don’t have to stay.

Wind launches itself at the building. The walls shudder with each blast, like a cheap stage set, and the cold seeps through the near-useless membrane of the single-glazed window. My hands and
feet are yellow, and I wrap Will’s dressing gown tight round me and rub my fingers and toes, but the blood won’t come back. From the tatty armchair where I sit, I look through the
window of his two-bed bungalow, set up on a hill on the outskirts of town. A camera flash of winter sun bounces from windows across the road, the light too thin to take the chill from the air.
Tiers of houses on sloping streets give the impression of teetering down the hill, like a brickwork glacier, and in the valley below they are met by a dam of factories in an over-stuffed industrial
park. Beyond that is Will’s own personal fragment of sea. From his vantage point up here on the hill, he can watch the boats and trawlers slide in and out of port, big rusty hunks of metal
and rigging which for Will transform into vessels of magnificence and beauty. For that view alone it is worth living here.

This house used to belong to Will’s gran and he spent most of his boyhood here. One drunken night he told me the story of his mum, how she’d had him when she was a teenager. He
remembers her popping in from time to time to bring him sweets from her job at Woolworths. Later she got a boyfriend, and as Will grew older he saw her less and less, so it was his gran who brought
him up. I get the impression the old woman had had enough of child-rearing by the time Will came along, but some care is better than none at all. Will has never met his dad. He thinks he was, or
is, a fisherman, and Will’s obsession with the pubs around his town, striking up conversation with anyone who works on the water or in the port, is part of the myth he’s created for
himself that the sea is in his blood.

‘If I ever bump into my old man,’ he says, ‘reckon he owes me a pint.’

I wonder why his dad is the hero and his mum the demon. They both left.

Will is hidden behind the open kitchen door. His shadow casts a fuzzy shape on the lino, and the outline vibrates as he works at the pots and pans. A back door leads from the kitchen on to a
small concrete courtyard, north-facing, and this door clicks open and shut, the noise followed by a scatter of paws on the slippery floor signalling Bessie, Will’s little dog, coming in from
the yard.

Bessie lies down on the floor next to my chair and I stroke her sweat-damp coat. She’s old and smells doggy. Skinny ribs rise and fall with each puffy wheeze and my fingers sense what
little fat there is between her fur and the bones underneath. Her body is winding down. ‘You’re not long for this world, are you, my sweet Bess?’ Will said last night as he
stroked the little dog on his lap.

Lying back into the cushions, I know I need to get dressed, find my mobile, connect with the day, but I allow myself a few moments as I wait for my head to clear. If I wasn’t here, what
would I be doing now?

It’s a Saturday. David is at the gym or walking the dogs and I’d be at home no doubt, tiptoeing around the empty house like an unwanted guest who’s outstayed their welcome. I
picture myself walking through our immaculate rooms, the walls and furniture colour coordinated, and my stockinged feet testing the spring of the carpet under my toes. The fabric’s quality
thrills me, and the vacuum lines left on the wool by the cleaner look like a manicured lawn. I’m always afraid of spoiling the pattern. The luxury and perfection of the house are my roots,
keeping me grounded and sane, and with no clutter or mess I can half believe that state exists within me as well.

If I was there, what would I be doing? I’d be planning to go out.

‘Do you want a tea, angel?’ Will calls from the kitchen. He’s been scrabbling through his repertoire of cutesy names, trying to find one that fits.

‘Rachel? Are you there?’ He turns the radio down and pops his head round the door. I smile – a small smile. ‘Tea?’ he says with a big grin. His nose is on the large
side, his lips uneven and flat, and his eyes are squinty with one black socket from last night’s drunken fight, but when all these features are arranged as a whole, some magic of nature
creates the sum of a good-looking man. As he smiles, lines ripple from his mouth through to his cheek, and even though his skin holds the wear-and-tear of over twenty years of drinking, underneath
is a warm boyish face.

‘OK.’ I raise myself from the creaky chair and follow him into the kitchen, to sit at the yellow Formica table. The surface is speckled like a bird’s egg and scarred by years
of cutlery.

Will turns his back to me and resumes the washing-up. He leans across to put the kettle on with a confident flick. It’s his house now, not the pub or the bedroom with the lights off.
We’ve explored secret parts of each other’s bodies, but today is only the second time we’ve been together the next morning, and this everyday world of Will embarrasses and shocks
me, more so than if he’d stood in front of me naked; there’s greater intimacy and more to reveal from the minutiae of his domestic rituals than in the sex we have. He looks different in
daylight and in his own home, away from the protective cloak of the dimly lit pub, and his actions are more mobile though touched with self-consciousness. I get the sense the kitchen hasn’t
been cleaned for a while and it’s being done in my honour, or even more worrying, out of some kind of proof to me that he can do it, that he is a viable human who functions on the same level
as everyone else, that we could have a future. My hangover helps me resist the temptation to join in and pretty up what is essentially a grown man’s den.

BOOK: The Liar's Chair
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