She worked tirelessly – evenings, weekends, using all of her annual leave – to build something beautiful. With her small hands, she tore wallpaper, sanded doors, painted cupboards, smoothed carpet, laid floorboards, sewed blinds: everything. Until these rooms emitted the same warmth that she does; a quiet confidence, a recognisable yet indefinable sense of home.
Marnie loaded the bowls into the dishwasher, leaving a space between each.
‘They clean better this way,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I replied, because she said the same thing every week, because I made the same noise – a tiny grunt – every week, because it seemed such a waste of water to me.
‘Things are going well with Charles,’ she said.
A prickle climbed my spine, pulling me straight, forcing air into my lungs.
We had only talked about their relationship once before then and it had been a conversation fraught with the long, twisted history of a very old friendship. Ever since, we had spoken only in practical terms: their plans for the weekend; the house they might someday buy far beyond the outer limits of London; his mother, riddled with cancer, living in Scotland and dying a very slow, painful, lonely death.
We had not, for example, discussed the fact that they had been together for three years and that several months earlier I had found unexpectedly – and I know I shouldn’t have been looking – a diamond engagement ring hidden in the depths of Charles’s bedside table. Nor had we discussed the fact that, even without that ring, they were careering towards a permanent commitment that would bind them eternally, in a way that – even after almost twenty years – Marnie and I had never been bound.
We had not discussed the fact that I hated him.
‘Yes,’ I replied, because I was afraid that a full sentence, perhaps even a two-syllable word, would send our friendship hurtling into chaos.
‘Don’t you think?’ she said. ‘Don’t you think that things are looking good for us?’
I nodded and poured the remaining cream from the jug back into its plastic supermarket container.
‘You think we’re right for each other, don’t you?’ she asked.
I opened the fridge door and hid behind it, slowly – very slowly – returning the cream to the top shelf.
‘Jane?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I do.’
That was the first lie I told Marnie.
I wonder now – most days, in fact – if I hadn’t told that first lie, would I have told the others? I like to tell myself that the first lie was the least significant of them all. But that, ironically, is a lie. If I had been honest that Friday evening, everything might have been – would have been – different.
I want you to know this now. I thought I was doing the right thing. Old friendships are like knotted rope, worn in some parts and thick and bulbous in others. I feared that this thread of our love was too thin, too frayed, to bear the weight of my truth. Because surely the truth – that I had never hated anyone the way I hated him – would have destroyed our friendship.
If I had been honest – if I had sacrificed our love for theirs – then Charles would almost certainly still be alive.
THE SECOND LIE
Chapter Two
This, then, is my truth. I don’t mean to sound so dramatic, but I think you deserve to know this story. I guess I think that you need to know this story. It is as much yours as it is mine.
Charles is dead, yes, but that was never my intention. In truth, it never occurred to me that he would ever be anything other than painfully, permanently present. He was one of those overpowering, dominant people: the loudest voice, the grandest gestures, taller and broader and stronger and better than anyone else in any room. You might have said that he was larger than life, which now, of course, feels rather ironic. That said, the simple fact of his being seemed evidence enough that he would always be.
For the first years of my life – and, I suppose, this is true for the first years of most lives – my family formed a framework. The big choices, those that defined my everyday – where I lived, who I spent time with, even what I called myself – were not mine at all. My parents were the puppeteers dictating the shape of my life.
Eventually, I was expected to make my own choices: what to play and with whom and where and when. My family had been everything, the only thing, until they became but the foundations from which I built an identity of my own. It was refreshing to discover that I was, in fact, my own entity and yet it was a little overwhelming, too.
But I was lucky. I found a companion.
Marnie and I soon became inseparable. We looked nothing alike but our teachers regularly called us by the other’s name. Because we were never one without the other. We sat side by side in every lesson and walked between classrooms together and travelled home on the same bus at the end of the day.
I hope that one day you experience a similar friendship. You can tie yourself into a teenage love in a way that feels eternal, bonded by new experiences and a newfound sense of freedom. There is something so enchanting about a first best friend at eleven. It is intoxicating to be so needed, to crave someone so acutely, and that feeling of being so completely entwined. But these early bonds are unsustainable. And someday you will choose to extricate yourself from this friendship in the pursuit, instead, of lovers. You will extract yourself limb by limb, bone by bone, memory from memory, until you can exist independently, until you are again one person where once you were two.
We were still two, Marnie and me, when – after university – we moved into the flat in Vauxhall. It was modern, in a new build erected less than a decade earlier, surrounded by other similar buildings with other similar flats, all off corridors with blue carpet and behind identical pine doors. It had plastic wood-effect flooring, sleek white kitchen units and soulless magnolia walls. There were spotlights in every room – the bedrooms, too – and peach tiles on the bathroom floor. It felt cold somehow, wintry, but it was always too warm. But it was our haven from the fiercely bright lights and the never-ending noise of a cosmopolitan city in which neither of us, at that time, felt entirely comfortable.
Things were different then. We discussed our diaries over cereal and delegated responsibilities for the day: a new bottle of shampoo, batteries for the remote, something for dinner. We walked side by side to the tube station. We boarded the same carriage. It would have made sense for me to board at the other end, so that my exit was in front of me when I disembarked, but our lives were so intricately woven that travelling separately would have seemed ludicrous.
We rushed home from work to cement the gaps that had opened over the course of a single day. We boiled the kettle and turned on the oven and laughed at ridiculous colleagues and sobbed over terrible meetings. We were intimate, cohabiting in a way that bonded us: shared pints of milk in the fridge, shoes in a pile behind the front door, books mingled on shelves, framed photographs perching on windowsills. We were so thoroughly embedded in each other’s lives that a crack, however small, seemed impossible.
We had little money and little time and yet every few weeks we ventured out to a new corner of this new world, to visit a restaurant or a bar and to explore a new part of this new city. Marnie was freelancing alongside her job and was always looking for something to write about. She dreamt about being the first to recognise a restaurant that was later granted a Michelin star. She had worked in the marketing team for a chain of pubs since graduating but, just a few months in, had decided that she wanted to do something more creative, more rewarding, more intimate, too. She had started writing a blog about food: collating information and restaurant reviews and eventually writing her own recipes as well.