Beautiful Liars. Isabel Ashdown

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СКАЧАТЬ Is it something you can be taught? Is it something I could learn now, given a fresh chance to mix in the world?

      To begin with, despite my awkwardness, the other children were pleasant enough. They were so young, and looking back it seems to me now that a child’s default setting is probably one of kindness—just like those adorable Heathcote twins—until someone steers them off that path. In those first few days, some of them even tried to coax me into their playtime games of horsey or chase, but I must have put them off somehow, giving off that scent of discomfort and fear that popular children sniff out so quickly. All it had taken was one child to call me out—a beautiful boy with deep almond eyes—and I was marked as “the one.” After all, I know, there always has to be a “one,” doesn’t there? This is what we see in films and on television, what I read in my paperbacks and magazine short stories. Every group needs a “one”—an imperfect person to shine light upon their own perfections—an ugly person to hold up a mirror to their beauty. Well, I was the one. “Poopy Head!” was that boy’s war cry in the concrete playground of St. John’s infant school, and he ran from me, archly pinching his nostrils and whooping a loud “Poo-poo!” as he went. Others joined in his dance, and soon there was a small army of them waiting for me on the playground at each break, prancing at my rear like merry shadows, plucking at their noses and giggling to the chorus of “Poo-poo!” It stuck. If the teachers or playground monitors noticed, they showed no sign, and so it went on for weeks and months in its various guises, only stopping when my mother removed me from the school at the end of the academic year, never to return again. Thank goodness for Mum. She was hopeless in so many ways, but there’s no denying she rescued me from that particular hell. She stepped up to the challenge when it really counted. “We don’t need them,” she told me as we marched back home on that last day, her back straight, her aquiline nose raised to the sky. That evening we sat at the kitchen table and made plans for my homeschooling, my mother growing more excited with every jot of her pen, every plan that she hatched. “And we’ll have school trips to the Science Museum, and the Planetarium—and Sea World!” she told me, as Dad cooked spaghetti bolognese and wordlessly laid out the cutlery around us. “Just you, me, and a packed lunch for two!”

      Mum looked lovelier than I’d ever seen her; she loved me so much that I thought she might explode with it, and me with her.

      I stretch my leaden arms high above my head, easing out my aching limbs. I must stop dozing on the sofa like this; it plays havoc with the weakness in my neck, and taking painkillers only aggravates my delicate tummy. Shunting up to the edge of the cushions, I lift the lid on my laptop, resolving to do a bit more research on the girls. I’ve been building up a scrapbook of details, saving them to a special Pinterest board where I can view them as a whole. It’s a bit like one of those police wall charts you see on TV, where the investigating officers stick up photographs of suspects and pieces of evidence, scrawling arrows and connectors between sticky notes, building up momentum toward the inevitable eureka moment. My Investigation Wall is virtual, and visible to me alone. Already I’ve managed to track down a Year Ten photograph from a Bridge School alumni page I discovered on Facebook, although I’m struggling to work out which of the girls is Olivia. So many of the girls have that same generic ’90s look: heavy-fringed and sulky, their ties worn short and stubby, loose at the neck. Martha I recognized straight away, so familiar am I with her famous face and that thick, flowing hair—though of course she wears it darker now, cut in a sophisticated bob—and Juliet, well, it was impossible not to notice her, so strikingly beautiful was she at fifteen. Like Martha, her hair is worn loose and gently wavy, a light honey-brown against so many bottle-dyed blondes and Morticia blacks. She is a natural beauty. Hers was the first face I was drawn to, and images from historic newspaper reports were easily found online to confirm it was her. I feel a sudden urgency to track down more details for them all, to further populate my Investigation Wall, to build up my case. I’ve always harbored secret ambitions to write a crime novel, and I think perhaps all this research will serve me well as practice! At any rate, if Martha does get back to me, I need to make myself useful, to come up with some nugget of information she’ll appreciate—something that will make me indispensable. It’s vital that Martha continues to believe this is Liv she’s talking to, that it’s Liv she’s confiding in. I’ll start with a bit more digging on Martha and see where it takes me.

      Just as I type the words “Martha Benn” into the search bar, an e-mail alert pops up in the top right corner of the screen. “From Martha Benn,” it announces. Well, what are the chances of that? I marvel, and already I’m wondering if it is evidence of a connection deeper than either of us could ever know. I switch screens, hovering over the message for one delicious, tantalizing moment of hesitation, enjoying the pain, before I click Open.

      6

      Martha

      The e-mail from Liv had taken Martha by surprise yesterday morning. She hadn’t expected a reply so quickly—Liv’s family might have moved on from her childhood address long ago—but the pleasure of the quick response had been dulled slightly by its formal tone. Martha had at least thought she might recognize something more of the old Liv in it. Olivia Heathcote had been the joker of their group, the one most likely to swear and tell dirty jokes and scribble graffiti on the toilet walls at school. She was the daring one, the chancer, the one who had made her and Juliet take themselves less seriously.

      Liv’s family had been big and noisy, a world of difference from the hushed void that was Martha’s home after her mother’s departure. Liv had complained endlessly about lack of privacy, having to share with an older sister, and then—the horror—having to give up her bed for a confused grandmother who called out in the night as Liv slept on the camp bed across the room. “In the pantry!” Nanna had taken to shouting in the night. “The eggs are in the pantry with the plums!” Liv’s impersonations were hysterical; every morning as they walked to school, she’d update Martha and Juliet on the previous night’s nocturnal wakings, clutching at their sleeves and rolling her head back in a pose of fitful sleep. “Me smalls are on the line!” she’d shriek. “I’ll ’ave ’is guts for garters if ’e don’t sort the sink out!” Sometimes Liv’s stories could leave Martha and Juliet gasping for breath, the joy of their laughter enough to eclipse the loneliness Martha had left a few streets away in Stanley House. Thank God for Liv and her crazy family.

      “Gordon Bennett,” she groaned one morning in a mimic of her mother. “The twins are toilet training at the moment. Mum left Frankie on the potty while she made the porridge, but he got off it when her back was turned and laid one down on the bottom step of the stairs.”

      ‘No!” Juliet and Martha screamed, neither of them having experience of so big a family.

      “All of a sudden Nanna shouts from the hall, ‘Joyce! What the ’ell are you feeding them? Could’ve broke my neck on it! Slippery as a whelk!’ Right up between her toes, it was. Dad had to leave his breakfast half eaten, he was retching that bad.”

      Martha recalls having to stop on a bench, laughing so hard she thought she would actually wet herself, and the three of them sat for a while, catching their breath and sighing before sprinting the rest of the way to school to avoid missing the bell. Slippery as a whelk became their catchphrase, to be called out to one another over the toilet cubicles at school, a code for anything stinky or ugly or grim. When cauliflower cheese was on the canteen menu, Liv would make vomit fingers at it, silently mouthing, “Slippery as a whelk.” When Gina Norris brought her ugly little baby to show off outside the school gates in Year Eleven, the three of them whispered to one another that only a mother could love a face like that, what with it being “as slippery as a whelk.”

      Martha misses that laughter, the camaraderie of a well-worn joke, the ability to communicate with another human being in so few words. There’s only her and Liv now; surely they owe it to each other to rekindle their friendship? She can’t have forgotten, can she? Not when they shared so much. Liv and Juliet were more than just СКАЧАТЬ