‘I grew up too soon,’ she replies. ‘I lost my virginity at, like, eleven. I slept with guys and slept with girls and smoked a lot of pot. I tried heroin at twelve and ice when I was thirteen.’
Evie rolls her eyes.
Cordelia glares at her. ‘My mum called the police on me, so I tried to poison her with floor cleaner.’
‘To punish her?’ asks Guthrie.
‘Maybe,’ says Cordelia. ‘It was like an experiment, you know. I wanted to, like, see what would happen.’
‘Did it work?’ asks Nat.
‘Nah,’ replies Cordelia. ‘She said the soup tasted funny and didn’t finish the bowl. Made her vomit, that’s all.’
‘You should have used wolfsbane,’ says Nat.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a plant. I heard about this gardener who died when he touched the leaves.’
‘My mum doesn’t like gardening,’ says Cordelia, missing the point.
Guthrie passes the teddy bear to Evie. ‘Your turn.’
‘Nope.’
‘Why not?’
‘The details of my life are inconsequential.’
‘That’s not true.’
Evie sighs and leans forward, resting her forearms on her knees, squeezing the bear with both hands. Her accent changes.
‘My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet . . .’
I laugh. Everybody looks at me.
‘It’s from Austin Powers,’ I explain.
More blank stares.
‘The movie . . . Mike Myers . . . Dr Evil.’
Still nothing.
Evie puts on a gruff Scottish accent. ‘First things first. Where’s your shitter? I’ve got a turtle-head poking out.’
‘Fat Bastard,’ I say.
Evie smiles. Guthrie is annoyed with me, as though I’m fomenting unrest.
He calls on another teenager, who has a blue streak in her hair and piercings in her ears, eyebrows and nose.
‘What brings you here, Serena?’
‘Well, it’s a long story.’
Groans all round.
Serena recounts an episode from her life when she went to America as an exchange student at sixteen and lived with a family in Ohio, whose son was in prison for murder. Every fortnight they insisted Serena visit him, making her wear her sexiest clothes. Short dresses. Low-cut tops.
‘He was on the other side of the glass and his father kept telling me to lean closer and show him my tits.’
Evie sneezes into the crook of her arm in a short, sharp exhalation, that sounds a lot like, ‘Bullshit!’
Serena glares at her but goes on with her story. ‘One night, when I was sleeping, the father came into my room and raped me. I was too frightened to tell my parents or call the police. I was alone in a foreign country, thousands of miles from home.’ She looks around the group, hoping for sympathy.
Evie sneezes again – making the same sound.
Serena tries to ignore her.
‘Back home, I started having problems – drinking and cutting myself. My parents sent me see to a therapist, who seemed really nice at the beginning until he tried to rape me.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ says Evie, sighing in disgust.
‘We’re not here to pass judgement,’ Guthrie warns her.
‘But she’s making shit up. What’s the point of sharing if people are gonna tell lies.’
‘Fuck you!’ shouts Serena, flipping Evie the finger.
‘Bite me!’ says Evie.
Serena leaps to her feet. ‘You’re a freak! Everybody knows it.’
‘Please sit down,’ says Guthrie, trying to keep the girls apart.
‘She called me a fucking liar.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ says Evie. ‘I called you a psycho fucking liar.’
Serena ducks under Guthrie’s arm and launches herself across the space, knocking Evie off her chair. The two of them are wrestling on the floor, but Evie seems to be laughing as she wards off the blows.
An alarm has been raised and a security team bursts into the group therapy room, dragging Serena away. The rest of the teenagers are ordered back to their bedrooms, all except for Evie. Dusting herself off, she touches the corner of her lip, rubbing a smudge of blood between her thumb and forefinger.
I give her a tissue. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. She punches like a girl.’
‘What happened to your neck?’
‘Someone tried to strangle me.’
‘Why?’
‘I have that sort of face.’
I pull up a chair and motion for Evie to sit down. She complies, crossing her legs, revealing an electronic tag on her ankle.
‘Why are you wearing that?’
‘They think I’m trying to escape.’
‘Are you?’
Evie raises her forefinger to her lips and makes a shushing sound.
‘First chance I get.’
2
Guthrie meets me in a pub called the Man of Iron, named after the nearby Stanton Ironworks, which closed down years ago. He’s perched on a stool with an empty pint glass resting between his elbows, watching a fresh beer being pulled.
‘Your regular boozer?’ I ask, sitting next to him.
‘My escape,’ he replies. His fingers are pudgy and pale, decorated with a tri-band wedding ring.
The barman asks if I want something. I shake my head and Guthrie looks disappointed to be drinking alone. Over his shoulder I see a lounge area with a pool table and fruit machines that ping and blink like a fairground ride.
‘You’re looking good,’ I say. Lying. ‘How’s married life?’
‘Terrific. Great. Making me fat.’ He pats his stomach. ‘You should try it.’
‘Getting fat?’
‘Marriage.’
‘How are the kids?’
‘Growing like weeds. We have two now, a boy and a girl, eight and five.’
I can’t remember his wife’s name but recall her being eastern European, with a thick accent and a wedding dress that looked like a craft project that had gone horribly wrong. Guthrie had met her when he was teaching part-time at an English language school in London.
‘What did you think of Evie?’ he asks.
‘She’s a real charmer.’
‘She’s one of them.’
‘One of who?’
‘The lie detectors.’
I suppress a laugh. He looks aggrieved.
‘You saw her. She knew when they were lying. She’s a truth wizard – just like you wrote about.’
‘You read my thesis?’
‘Every word.’
I make a face. ‘That was eight years ago.’
‘It was published.’
‘And I concluded that truth wizards didn’t exist.’
‘No, you said they represented a tiny percentage of the population – maybe one in five hundred – and the best of them were accurate eighty per cent of the time. You also wrote that someone could develop even greater skills, a person who wasn’t disrupted by emotions or lack of familiarity with the subject; someone who functioned at a higher level.’