The Lying Game

‘Will you just fuck off?’ Fatima says. She is almost incoherent, choking with anger. ‘What the hell have my choices got to do with you?’

‘I could say the same thing to you,’ Thea swings round. ‘How dare you judge me? I do what I have to do to sleep at night. So do you, apparently. How about you respect my coping mechanisms and I’ll respect yours?’

‘I care about you!’ Fatima shouts. ‘Don’t you get that? I don’t give a fuck how you cope with your shit. I don’t care if you become a Buddhist nun, or take up transcendental meditation, or go to work for an orphanage in Romania. All of that is entirely your own business. But watching you turn into an alcoholic? No! I will not pretend I’m OK with that just to fit in with some misguided shit about personal choices.’

Thea opens her mouth, and I think she is about to reply, but instead she turns to one side and vomits again into the ditch.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ Fatima says resignedly, but the shaking anger has gone from her voice, and when Thea straightens, wiping water from her eyes, she reaches into her bag and pulls out a packet of wet wipes. ‘Look, take these. Clean yourself up.’

‘Thanks,’ Thea mutters. She stands up, shakily, and almost stumbles, and Fatima takes her arm to steady her.

As they make their slow way over the turf, I hear Thea say something to Fatima, too quietly for me and Kate to hear, but I catch Fatima’s reply.

‘It’s OK, Thee, I know you didn’t. I just – I care about you, you know that?’

‘Sounds like they’ve made up,’ I whisper to Kate and she nods, but her face in the moonlight is troubled.

‘This is only the beginning though,’ she says, her voice very low. ‘Isn’t it?’

And I realise she’s right.

‘NEARLY THERE,’ KATE says, as we clamber painfully over yet another stile. The marsh is so strange in the darkness, the route I thought I remembered in daylight retreating into the shadows. I can see lights in the distance that must, I think, be Salten village, but the winding sheep paths and rickety bridges make it hard to plot your course, and I realise, with a shudder, that if it wasn’t for Kate, we’d be screwed. You could be lost out here for hours, in the darkness, wandering in circles.

Fatima is still holding Thea’s arm, guiding her steps as she stumbles with a drunkard’s concentration from tussock to ridge, and she’s about to say something when I stiffen, put my finger to my lips, shushing her, and we all stop.

‘What?’ Thea says, her voice slurred and too loud.

‘Did you hear that?’

‘Hear what?’ Kate asks.

It comes again, a cry, from very far away, so like Freya’s sobbing wail when she’s at almost the peak of her distress that I feel a tightness in my breasts and a spreading warmth inside my bra.

A small part of my mind registers the irritation, and the fact that I forgot to put breast pads in before I left – but below that the much, much larger part of me is frantically trying to make out the sound in the darkness. It cannot be Freya, surely?

‘That?’ Kate says as it comes again. ‘It’s a gull.’

‘Are you sure?’ I say. ‘It sounds like –’

I stop. I can’t say what it sounded like. They will think I’m crazy.

‘They sound like children, don’t they?’ Kate says. ‘It’s quite eerie.’

But then the wail comes again, longer, louder, rising to a hysterical bubbling pitch, and I know that is not a gull, it can’t be.

I let go of Thea’s arm and I set off at a run into the darkness, ignoring Kate’s cry of ‘Isa, wait!’

But I can’t – I can’t wait. Freya’s cry is like a hook in my flesh, pulling me inexorably across the darkened marsh. And now I’m not thinking, my feet remember the paths almost automatically. I vault the muddy slough before I’ve even remembered it was there. I sprint along the raised bank with the mud-filled ditches either side. And all the time I hear Freya’s high, bubbling cry coming from somewhere up ahead – like something out of a fairy tale, the light that lures the children into the marsh, the sound of bells that tricks the unwary traveller.

She is close now – I can hear everything, the siren pitch as she reaches the furious peak of her scream, and then the choking snotty gasps in between as she revs up again for the next wail.

‘Freya!’ I shout. ‘Freya, I’m coming!’

‘Isa wait!’ I hear from behind me, and I hear Kate’s footsteps pounding after me.

But I’m almost there. I scramble over the final stile between the marsh and the Reach, hearing the rip of the borrowed dress without caring – and then everything seems to slow down to the pace of a nightmare – my breath roaring in my ears, my pulse pounding in my throat. For there, in front of me, is not Liz, the girl from the village, but a man. He is standing near the water’s edge, his silhouette a dark hulk against the moon-silvered waters – and he is holding a baby.

‘Hey!’ I shout, my voice a roar of primal fury. ‘Hey, you!’

The man turns, and the moonlight falls upon his face, and my heart seems to stutter in my chest. It’s him. It’s Luc Rochefort, holding a child – my child – like a human shield across him, the deep waters of the Reach shimmering behind him.

‘Give her to me,’ I manage, and the voice that comes out of my mouth is almost alien – a snarling roar that makes Luc take an involuntary step back, his fingers tightening on Freya. She has seen me, though, and she reaches out her little chubby arms, her scarlet face sparkling in the moonlight with tears, so furious that she can’t even muster a wail now, just a long, continuous series of gasps as she attempts to draw breath for a final, annihilating shriek.

‘Give her to me!’ I scream, and I bound forward and snatch her out of Luc’s grasp, feeling her cling to me like a little marsupial, her fingers digging into my neck, clutching at my hair. She smells of cigarette smoke and alcohol – bourbon maybe, I’m not sure. It’s him. It’s his smell, all over her skin. ‘How dare you touch my child!’

‘Isa,’ he says. He holds out his hands pleadingly, and I can smell the spirits on his breath. ‘It wasn’t like that –’

‘It wasn’t like what?’ I snarl. Freya’s small, hot body flails and arches against mine. ‘What’s going on?’ I hear from behind me, and Kate comes running up, panting and flushed. Then, incredulously, ‘Luc?’

‘He had Freya,’ I say. ‘He took her.’

‘I didn’t take her!’ Luc says. He takes a step forward, and I fight the urge to turn and run. I will not show this man I’m afraid of him.

‘Luc, what the hell were you thinking?’ Kate says.

‘It wasn’t like that!’ he says, louder, his voice almost a shout. And then again, more levelly, trying to calm himself, and us, ‘It wasn’t like that. I turned up at the Mill to talk to you, to apologise to Isa for being …’ He stops, takes a breath, turns to me, and his expression is almost pleading. ‘In the post office. I didn’t want you think – but I turned up and Freya, she was beside herself – she was screaming like this –’ He gestures to Freya, still red-faced and sobbing but calmer now she can smell me. She is very tired, I can feel her flopping against me between bursts of screeching. ‘What’s-her-name, Liz, she was panicking, she said she’d tried to call you but her phone was out of credit, and I said I’d take Freya outside for a walk, try to calm her down a bit.’

‘You took her!’ I manage. I am almost incoherent with rage. ‘How do I know you weren’t about to drag her off across the marsh?’

‘Why would I do that?’ His face is full of angry bewilderment. ‘I didn’t take her anywhere – the Mill’s right there, I was just trying to calm her down. I thought the stars and the night –’

‘Jesus Christ, Luc,’ Kate snaps. ‘That’s not the point. Isa entrusted her baby to Liz – you can’t just take matters into your own hands like that.’