The Past and Other Lies Read online

  ‘Aye, well,’ was all Dave would admit. He turned back to the television, putting his hands in his pockets and awaiting the reappearance of Dr Zaresky.

  The thing about Dave was, if you unpacked all of his post-feminist, intertextual, queer theory ideas, you were left with just one concept: Does she have big tits? After three years of negotiating cramped office space, enduring departmental briefings and buying rounds of cheap bitter at the Union bar, it had become all too clear to Charlotte that this was the foundation upon which all Dave’s philosophies rested. Charlotte would have preferred to share her office with a woman. Any woman. Except perhaps Dr Lempriere.

  She turned back to the essays. The top one had a slightly sticky rust-coloured stain on the front page, the origin of which she didn’t wish to speculate on. She stared at the words on the title page but they no longer seemed to make any sense. She put the essays down again.

  Jennifer had actually said that. On national television.

  But there was every chance no one had seen it. Certainly Charlotte had made a point of telling no one about the program—and that was when she was still under the mistaken impression her sister was going on television to talk about violence in children’s computer games. (And what the hell was that? A smokescreen? How did ‘Violence in Computer Games’ become ‘I Saved My Sister’s Life!’?) But Dave had walked in, right in the middle of it, when surely—she glanced up at the clock that balanced on top of a bookshelf—yes, surely Dave should be running a first-year Subjectivity tute right now?

  Her mobile phone went off with a series of alarming beeps and Charlotte jumped.

  ‘I wish you’d change that,’ remarked Dave, whose own mobile phone played the theme from The A-Team.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Charlotte? Why didn’t you tell me Jennifer was going to say all those things on the television? Why would she make up something like that? Wasn’t she going to be talking about violence and computer games?’

  It was her mother.

  Mrs Denzel worked Tuesdays at a respectable charity shop in the high street of a quiet commuter suburb in north-west London. She hadn’t missed a day at the shop in eight years—not counting holidays and the Tuesday four years earlier when she’d accompanied Dad to the hospital for his hernia operation—which meant she definitely shouldn’t be at home watching daytime television. Not on a Tuesday. And she never rang during office hours unless...

  Charlotte couldn’t recall a single occasion when her mother had rung her at work before.

  ‘Charlotte?’

  Various possible responses now presented themselves: excuses, evasions, platitudes, denials. She plumped for denial.

  ‘Oh, hi, Mum. You mean Jen wasn’t talking about computer games? I just turned on and caught the end—’

  ‘She was talking about you! About us!’ Mrs Denzel paused to let this sink in. ‘Did you know she was going to do that? You should have stopped her.’

  On the television screen Dr Zaresky had returned, her lip gloss touched up, her smile fully armed and aimed straight at the studio audience, whom she charmed mutely before turning to her left. The camera zoomed in on a middle-aged black woman in a red dress and large diamond earrings, an awed expression on her face. Dave turned up the volume then reached up to fiddle with the aerial and the image shuddered.

  ‘I know nothing about it, Mum. I only caught the end. I can’t really say. It’s probably just some story she made up,’ said Charlotte dismissively.

  She closed her eyes and into her head popped a vision of Jennifer’s face, Jennifer smiling and chatting, then not smiling or chatting because someone’s fist, Charlotte’s fist as it turned out, had smashed right into her mouth and shut her up.

  Charlotte opened her eyes and little red spots flickered in the periphery of her vision.

  ‘But I don’t see why—’

  ‘Really, Mum, I’m sure none of whatever she said is true—except perhaps the shepherd’s pie and packet peas.’ Charlotte laughed weakly. Denial hadn’t worked, so maybe humour.

  There was silence at the other end of the line. Then, ‘I always tried to give you children fresh vegetables,’ said Mrs Denzel, ‘until that new Safeway opened up in the high street, then it was just easier to buy frozen.’

  Charlotte waited. She knew her mother hadn’t rung up to defend her cooking skills.

  ‘But don’t you think it’s a bit...odd? That she’d go on the telly and make up such things? I know she’s sometimes a bit...dramatic. Highly strung, they called it in my day. She got that from her grandmother, of course.’

  She paused and Charlotte considered her grandmother. The idea that anyone might have considered Grandma Lake dramatic was baffling.

  ‘But to make things up...?’ said Mrs Denzel, then she fell silent as though a thought had just struck her. ‘Do you think maybe she believes it herself? Thinks it really happened? They do say—’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ interrupted Charlotte. ‘I just think she enjoys the attention, particularly if it’s at my expense. And she’s been desperate to get on Kim’s program for a year.’

  That wasn’t quite true—Kim’s program had only been running since the autumn and the way the ratings were going it would be lucky to last till the spring. As for Jennifer being desperate to get on it, well, they’d never actually discussed it, but some things you just knew.

  Violence in children’s computer games! What a load of rubbish.

  ‘Well, I think you should ask her about it... Or should we just pretend we didn’t watch it?’ said Mrs Denzel doubtfully.

  Charlotte said nothing. She didn’t need to ask Jennifer about it. She didn’t need to ask Jennifer about anything.

  There was a gasp at the other end of the phone.

  ‘Who else do you think might have seen it?’

  And that, of course, was the key question. Charlotte could almost hear her mother mentally flicking through an address book containing the names of every relative and acquaintance of the last thirty years and calculating their likely proximity to a television set at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in late January.

  Not many, surely?

  Did they know anyone who watched daytime television? Who was unemployed? A housewife? Working from home? A student? Sick? Suddenly the possibilities seemed endless. And nowadays people had televisions in their workplaces—she was staring at one herself.

  On the screen Dr Zaresky was now explaining the terrible toll that kleptomania took on families and Dave stood there transfixed.

  ‘Mum, it’s Tuesday afternoon, everyone’s at work. And it’s daytime TV—no one’s watching it.’

  And that was perfectly true. No one that she knew, no one who knew her, would have watched it. It didn’t matter what complete strangers thought of her.

  ‘And I can assure you I didn’t tell anyone to watch it,’ she added.

  ‘I brought the small portable into the shop and set it up in the back room and we all watched it,’ said Mrs Denzel. ‘June Craven from head office came in halfway through and Irene Field’s daughter-in-law from the cafe popped in too.’

  Ouch.

  Jennifer had wanted them to watch. They’d both received a brief email the day before informing them she was going to be appearing on Kim’s show. It was supposed to be an alarmist and morally indignant segment on the trend towards violence in children’s toys. Jennifer, who managed the toy department of a large London department store, would provide the retailer’s viewpoint.

  There was a silence on the line, then, ‘I mean, we would have known, your dad and me, if anything like that had happened. You would have told us.’

  It wasn’t a question.

  ‘Of course we would have told you, Mum.’

  Afterwards, when Dave had remembered he had a tutorial and raced out of the office, Charlotte perched on the edge of her desk, contemplating the animated dramas of daytime television and praying for low ratings.

  An ad came on for Focus on Scotland that evening—‘...turnin
g the salmon farm into a theme park,’ announced the female presenter playfully with her perfect Home Counties enunciation (which was odd for a program called Focus on Scotland)—and Charlotte hit the off button.

  She logged onto her hotmail account for the first time that day and saw Jennifer’s email from yesterday morning plus an unread email also from Jennifer, sent late last night. Charlotte opened the new email, which explained that the segment on computer games had been cancelled at the last minute so there was now no point in Charlotte watching the show the next day, and could she please pass this on to Mum in case she didn’t check her email?

  Another new email popped into her inbox. It was from Graham. The heading read: Hey Sis. What’s Jen on and where can I get some???

  She logged out. The office phone rang and as she reached over, hand poised above the receiver to pick it up, she thought, just for a moment, that it might be Jennifer ringing to explain.

  It wasn’t.

  It was Dr Lempriere, calling from professor Pitney’s office to report that she, and indeed the entire department, had watched the program and had Charlotte ever thought about counselling?

  Located on the westernmost borders of the city, Waverley University—formerly the Waverley Institute of Technology—was housed within the bleak walls of the old Northgate Hospital, a vast red-brick Victorian building which had, at various times during its lifetime, housed quarantine patients, destitute mothers, war-wounded and, most recently, psychiatric patients. Now, refurbished, refashioned, re-roofed and renamed, it formed the nucleus of the university’s campus and contained the university’s administrative services, the students’ union, the international students’ centre, the computer labs, various shops and cafes, and Northgate Bar, in which 99p pints of Auld Augie could still be purchased.

  The old hospital had rested congenially amid ten acres of graceful woodland. Much of this woodland had now made way for a small cityscape of concrete and steel blocks, a crowd of prefabricated cabins, various sports fields, a gym and six car parks. It was into a secluded spot in the most remote and least-used car park that Charlotte, the following morning, slid her ten-year-old Fiesta. She had deliberately chosen this car park, the one behind the library, rather than her usual spot behind the Moffat Building. It was only the second week of term after the Christmas break and with summer exams so far off it seemed reasonable to assume that the library would be relatively deserted, particularly at eight thirty on a frozen Wednesday morning towards the end of January.

  She had fled the office, the department, and indeed the entire university, soon after the phone call from Dr Lempriere, and had taken refuge in the remains of a bottle of Tesco’s home-brand shiraz and a decision not to answer the phone to anyone.

  The phone had not rung.

  But today was a new working day and there were tutorials to get through, students to face and colleagues to avoid. Now all she had to do was get out of her car, cross the car park and enter the Moffat Building via the modern languages lab in the basement. She wasn’t hiding; she was keeping a low profile.

  She didn’t move, her fingers still locked around the now motionless steering wheel. Before her eyes popped the image of Jennifer perched on the edge of that cream leather sofa telling Kim (Dr Kim, who was a doctor of philosophy, mind you, and knew as much about medicine as your average Cultural Studies undergrad), telling Kim, telling the studio audience, telling the whole daytime television world, their private business.

  If Jennifer had suddenly decided to relate her little story at some family get-together that would have been awful enough. (What family get-together Charlotte couldn’t imagine—the Denzels hadn’t managed a Christmas in the same city for ten years.) But to do it on television on a Tuesday lunchtime, between an advert for incontinence pads and a segment on kleptomania in former child-star actors, was unforgivable. And now it seemed the entire Cultural Studies department had guffawed through it during their sausage rolls and pot noodles.

  Footsteps crunched in the snow behind the Fiesta and Charlotte pulled her head lower into the collar of her coat. The footsteps passed by, and despite it being early on a frozen Wednesday morning in the unfashionable end of an out-of-the-way car park, she recognised the balding head, battered briefcase and duffle coat of Professor Tom Pitney, head of the department.

  She sank down a little lower in her seat.

  What was Tom doing at the library? And at eight thirty in the morning? No one went to the library—at least, none of the faculty did, unless it was to read the free newspapers. It was Tom Pitney who would be renewing or terminating her contract in September. He would have seen yesterday’s program of course, and now he had come in early in order to work out who to reassign her classes to.

  She laid her head on the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

  ‘Hey!’ The tap on the driver’s-side window almost sent her head through the car roof.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  She wiped a gloved hand across the steamed-up window and made out Dr Lempriere standing beside the car with a bright smile as though the below-freezing car park on a Wednesday morning was a perfectly normal place to be—and perhaps it was if you were Canadian.

  Dr Lempriere was Dr Ashley Lempriere of UCO, Toronto, and she had joined the Cultural Studies department on a twelve-month lecturing exchange to teach the honours class.

  The same class Tom Pitney had promised Charlotte.

  She had swept into the faculty in the middle of a Monday morning departmental meeting, filling Tom’s stale office with a brisk New World breeze, a squeak of new leather, and the sort of teeth of which the average British person could only dream. The staff had exchanged curious sideways glances, Dave had sat up straighter and smoothed back his hair and Charlotte had looked over at Tom. Tom had started guiltily in his chair and dived into a large pile of papers on his desk and Charlotte had experienced a moment of doomed despair.

  ‘Not the same Ashley Lempriere who wrote The Author and the Death of Death?’ Bert Humphries, senior lecturer in Cultural Studies, had inquired, leaning forward, his bushy eyebrows twitching.

  And Tom had smiled and shrugged sheepishly to indicate that, sadly, things were out of his hands—and even though you knew that was bullshit, what could you do?

  Charlotte had begun scanning job ads.

  And now Dr Lempriere—Ashley—was rapping on her window with her reindeer-skin mittens and some kind of interaction appeared unavoidable.

  Charlotte fumbled for the button that made the window go down and not up. She found it at last and a shot of freezing air leapt into the warm car with her.

  ‘Dr Denzel,’ Ashley said. ‘What a surprise! Who you hiding from?’

  Charlotte smiled tightly back. ‘I’m returning a book,’ she said. They were outside the library, weren’t they?

  ‘That so?’ Ashley raised one eyebrow significantly higher than the other as though returning books to the library was the last thing she would have expected of a colleague. She gave a long and meaningful look at the pile of books that was stacked on the Fiesta’s passenger seat. ‘Any of those mine?’

  Dr Ashley Lempriere had written five academic texts, all of which were on various university course reading lists.

  ‘I hardly need to visit the library for that, do I? You gave us all signed copies when you arrived,’ Charlotte reminded her.

  ‘I did too. Well, come on then. Can’t spend all day skulking about round here, can we?’

  Charlotte reluctantly unclicked her seatbelt and gathered her stuff together.

  ‘So why’re you parked way out here? Trying to avoid everyone, huh?’ Ashley inquired, displaying the sort of bluntness British people did not need or appreciate, then she put an arm through Charlotte’s, breaking another taboo, and steered her towards the library where Charlotte really didn’t want to go. ‘Y’know, everybody’s talking ’bout nothing else but your sister’s TV show,’ she added.

  ‘Are they? Well that’s just great,’ replied Charlotte coldly.
‘And what do you suggest I do? Call a press conference?’

  That sounded bitter. She didn’t want to sound bitter, didn’t want to sound like it was a big deal. On the other hand it was a big deal and she didn’t want to appear too flippant either.

  Ashley appeared to give the press conference suggestion serious consideration.

  ‘I wouldn’t advise it. Colleague of mine at UCO made a media statement after a rape accusation. No one even knew about it till that media statement came out. ‘Course, he was finished after that. I took over most of his classes.’

  I’ll bet you did, thought Charlotte, mentally running through her own meagre class workload and wondering whether Ashley had designs on any of it.

  ‘Still, I guess it might not be a bad idea,’ mused Ashley. ‘I’ll even write you a media statement if you like: Dr Denzel wishes to make it known that the allegations levelled against her yesterday by her sister are totally unfounded and absolutely without substance. Or so she claims...’

  She turned a frankly inquisitive look in Charlotte’s direction but Charlotte refused to be drawn.

  An earnest woolly-hatted early-morning group of undergraduates milled around the library foyer handing out pamphlets and copies of the Socialist Worker. Charlotte had handed out pamphlets too, once—anti-apartheid stuff probably—but that seemed a long time ago. She felt suddenly old and depressed. Either Lempriere did have designs on her own ever-decreasing class list and was even now plotting her downfall, or she was just a nosy gossip.

  Charlotte declined an anti-whaling leaflet and reached into her pocket for a tissue. The icy air was making her nose run.

  ‘So you say your sister’s lying...?’ Ashley continued. Charlotte didn’t respond. ‘Okay, I guess she has her reasons, right? Though I can’t imagine what they’d be. And it ain’t none of my business anyways. What is she, in therapy or something?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of,’ Charlotte replied stiffly.

  She wasn’t at all sure how she felt about this question with its implication that her sister was a crazy person. On the other hand after yesterday’s little drama perhaps she was. Was Jennifer in therapy? Charlotte felt, a little uncomfortably, that that was the kind of question a sister ought to be able to answer.