There Will Be Lies
Read There Will Be Lies Online
Authors: Nick Lake
Hostage Three
by Nick Lake
‘A thrilling story of piracy and hostage-taking … a really exciting and thought-provoking read’
Clare Poole, The Bookseller
‘A clever and gripping story about a teenage girl’s journey of self-discovery’
Amanda Craig
‘Nick Lake’s stories are suspenseful, violent and very frightening. They are also honest, morally complex and powered by a huge generosity of spirit. He’s a terrific writer in both senses of the word’
Mal Peet
‘Well researched and nuanced,
Hostage Three
goes beyond the tropes of genre fiction, and does something rather more humane and interesting’
Guardian
‘Lake handles these difficult themes with great skill, making political points while never losing the balance between emotion and action. He captures Amy’s sense of abandonment with moving sensitivity and maintains the plot tension throughout’
Daily Mail
‘Nick Lake’s portrait of
Hostage Three
is so skilfully rendered’
Telegraph
‘An achievement to admire’
Five star review, Books For Keeps
‘Lake is adept at unusual tales inspired by real events’
The Times
‘This is a complex and thought-provoking thriller’
Marilyn Brocklehurst, The Bookseller
To Hannah, for always.
To Brooms, for now
.
My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish at the same time.
– BOB HICOK, from
Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem
I’m going to be hit by a car in about four hours, but I don’t know that yet.
The weird thing is, it’s not the car that’s going to kill me, that’s going to erase me from the world.
It’s something totally different. Something that happens eight days from now and threatens to end everything.
My name is Shelby Jane Cooper – is, was, whatever.
I’m seventeen years old when the car crash happens.
This is my story.
Chapter
1
When I come into the living room, Mom is not even slightly ready, which doesn’t surprise me. She’s got the TV on full blast; it’s so loud, the ground is vibrating. At the same time she’s got the closed captions on: Mom is a believer in total communication. She’s on the couch, in her pyjama jeans, working on one of her cross-stitches. On the screen, it’s news: something about a plane crashing some-where cold looking; torn metal gleaming in snow. I glance at the closed captions.
… with all 336 passengers lost, the black rocks – black box is yet to be discovered …
This is how they do it, see: there’s an actual person typing this stuff, and when they make a mistake, like saying black rocks instead of black box, they do that line, I don’t know what it’s called, like a long hyphen, and then they correct it.
It’s actually kind of hypnotic, because you start to picture this person, this totally ordinary person, not a presenter or anything, just sitting there and trying to write down what the anchor is saying and sometimes screwing up. It makes the TV feel human, I guess: I can see why Mom likes it.
Black rocks?
says Mom, and I didn’t even realise she was watching.
I mean, the context alone
.
Oh yeah: this is the other reason she keeps the closed captions on. She loves to see how other people do it. Mom’s a stenographer at the courthouse. She spends her whole working life transcribing the words of lawyers and witnesses, so for her, the people who do it on the TV are like unseen competitors.
You coming?
I ask.
Where?
I mime the swing, the slight pause when the bat strikes the ball, then the follow-through.
Mom checks her watch, ties off her thread, and wipes her hands on her pyjama jeans.
Sorry
, she says.
Got caught up. You finish your essay?
Yes
, I say. I have just been typing a three-thousand-word essay on decolonisation for her, with a special emphasis on French Indo-china. That’s when I haven’t been talking to my online friends on the forums, anyway. I love it: I love how I can talk so quickly, I mean, I can talk at the speed I type, which is super fast. Mom doesn’t know I even HAVE online friends, she wouldn’t let me have Facebook, that’s for sure, but she doesn’t know that you can open a private browser window either, and then no one can see your history.
OK, clarification: friends might be a stretch. But, you know, I have people I can talk to about TV shows and books that I love. And they know who I am, they welcome me when I log on. I know they could be anyone, they could be fifty-year-old creeps in their underpants, but I like talking to them. So sue me.
And anyway, it’s good for my typing skills, which helps when it comes to the tasks Mom sets me.
Mom is big on homework but she’s also big on typing and writing in general – it’s that total communication thing again, plus I guess she is a stenographer so it’s 110 per cent obvious why typing would be important to her. So I don’t just have to do the essays, I have to do them in a set time. This decolonisation essay she assigned me yesterday.
Good
, she says, about the homework.
I’ll read it tomorrow
.
She puts aside the picture she’s been stitching. It’s the same as all the others – a Scottish Highlands scene, purple mountains in the distance, a loch in the foreground. This time, a thistle growing up in the very front, just so you really know it’s Scotland. Not that I believe Scotland really looks like that – I mean, there’s no way any real place has colours like that.
Don’t ask me why Scotland, either. It’s just what she does. Always landscape, never with a person in the frame. She covers the walls, and then when she runs out of space, she starts to throw them out and begins all over again. She orders the patterns from the internet – for some reason, Scottish landscapes are popular enough that she pretty much never repeats herself.
One day
, she often says,
we’ll go there. See the mountains for ourselves. The stags
.
No we won’t, I always think. We might see mountains, but not these ones. Not these crazy fairy-tale peaks with their bright cotton colours. Still, I would like to go. I’d like to get out of this city in the desert, which is the only place I’ve ever known. To stand in the mountains, smelling the heather and the gorse. Seeing the mist rise off the ground, wreathing the horns of a stag. Hell, seeing mist. The closest we get is that heat shimmer off the roads; off the sand of the desert.
But of course we’ll never go. We’ll never leave the Phoenix area. I have asked a thousand times for a vacation; to go to some other place. Mom always says no when it comes right down to it. We’ve never even been to the Grand Canyon, and you can fly there in like an hour. There’s a little air strip in Scottsdale – it costs a thousand dollars per person, they fly you up there and all around the canyon, looking at it from above. A day trip. There was a time, when I was younger and brattier, I used to talk about it all the time, ask to go, mention it when my birthday was coming up. Now I know better. Now I know we can’t afford it – and even if we could, the scared look my mom gets on her face when it comes up, I think she’s scared of the plane.
So, SCOTLAND? Scotland is just a silly dream – hers more than mine, but mine too, I have to admit. If only to see what it really looks like.
Mom hauls her ass out of the easy chair, goes to the hall and pulls on a light jacket over her T-shirt and PYJAMA JEANS, and I’m putting that in all caps now in case you didn’t pick up on my subliminal referencing of her disgusting PYJAMA JEANS earlier. Also, in case it wasn’t obvious when I talked about her hauling her ass, she is not the slimmest, whereas I am naturally athletic, and this makes the pyjama jeans look even worse. I mean, I love her anyway, she’s got meat on her bones, whatever, but she doesn’t have to wear that ridiculous garment.
Do you have to wear those
? I say.
Yes
, says Mom.
It’s two in the afternoon
, I say.
You can’t go out in pyjamas
.
That’s why they’re made to look like jeans
.
They do not look like
–
But she’s turned around, so she doesn’t catch that. She just grabs her bag and motions for me to follow. I sigh and shake my head, giving up. I have told her about those horrible pants so many times now, and she just doesn’t listen. It’s almost like she WANTS to look like a loser, so you know, shrug.
No, I take back the shrug. It does bother me.
Because it’s just … it’s just, she looks like a loser RIGHT NEXT TO ME.
So anyway, I pick up my own bag and go out with her on to the warm street.
Keep up
, says Mom.
And stay close. Sometimes cars come up on the kerb and hit people
.
I know
, I say.
I know
.
I don’t know – not then, not for sure; I just believe her, like I believe her on everything.
Later, though, I do know for real.
2
We live in a three-storey apartment building in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is about as high as Scottsdale gets. We’re on Via Linda. That means ‘pretty road’ in Spanish, inaccurately. On the plus side we have a shared pool, which gets cleaned, oh, ABOUT EVERY THREE YEARS, and if you continue walking on Via Linda you get to the desert in about a half-hour, which is awesome.