The Lying Game

She didn’t move – she and Ambrose the still, hunched centre of our restless panic, but I had the sense that it was only because she had cried herself into numbness and despair before we arrived.

It was Thea who picked up the object lying on the kitchen table.

‘What’s this doing here?’

Kate didn’t answer, but I looked up, to see Thea holding something that looked like an old biscuit tin, covered with a delicate floral pattern. It was oddly familiar, and after a moment I realised where I’d seen it before – it was usually on the top shelf of the kitchen dresser, tucked away, almost out of sight.

There was a padlock on the lid, but the thin metal clasp had been wrenched open, as if by someone too distraught to bother with a key, and there was no resistance when Thea opened it. Inside was what looked like a jumble of medical equipment wrapped in an old leather strap, and lying on top was a crumpled up piece of cling film, with traces of powder still clinging to the folds; powder that stuck to Thea’s fingers as she touched the plastic wrap.

‘Careful!’ Fatima yelped. ‘You don’t know what that is – it could be poison. Wash your hands, quick.’

But then Kate spoke, from her position on the floor. She didn’t look up, but spoke into her hunched knees, almost as if she were talking to her father, stretched out on the rug in front of her.

‘It’s not poison,’ she said. ‘It’s heroin.’

‘Ambrose?’ Fatima said incredulously. ‘He – he was a heroin addict?’

I understood her disbelief. Addicts were people lying in alleyways, characters in Trainspotting. Not Ambrose, with his laughter and his red wine, and his wild creativity.

But something in her words had struck a chord – a phrase written above his painting desk, in his studio on the top floor, words that I’d seen so often but never tried to understand. You’re never an ex-addict, you’re just an addict who hasn’t had a fix in a while.

And they suddenly made sense.

Why hadn’t I asked him what they meant? Because I was young? Because I was selfish and self-absorbed, still at an age where only my own problems mattered?

‘He was clean,’ I said huskily. ‘Right, Kate?’

Kate nodded. She didn’t look away from her father, her eyes stayed fixed on his gentle, sleeping face, but when I came and sat beside her, she reached for my hand, and her voice was so low that it was hard to hear her.

‘He took it at university but I think it only got out of control after my mother died. But he got clean when I was still a baby – he’s been clean for as long as I can remember.’

‘Then why …’ Fatima began uncertainly. She trailed off, but her gaze went to the box on the table, and Kate knew what she meant.

‘I think …’ she spoke slowly, like someone trying hard to make themselves understand. ‘I think it was some kind of test … He tried to explain it to me once. It wasn’t enough just to keep it out of the house. He had to wake up every day and make a choice to stay – to stay c-clean for m-me.’

Her voice shook, and broke on the last word, and I put my arms around her, turning my face away from the sight of Ambrose lying sprawled peacefully on the rug, his olive skin pale as beeswax.

Why? I wanted to ask. Why?

But somehow I couldn’t say the words.

‘Oh my God,’ Fatima said. She sank down on the sofa arm, and her face was grey. I knew she was probably thinking, as I was, of the last time we’d seen Ambrose, his long legs stretched out at the table in front of the Mill’s windows, smiling as he sketched us playing in the water. It was only a week ago, and yet there had been nothing wrong. No hint of what was to come. ‘He’s dead,’ she said slowly, as if she were trying to make herself believe it. ‘He’s really dead.’

With those words, the reality of the situation seemed to sink in to all of us, and I felt a shiver of cold run from my neck, all the way down my back, prickling at the skin, as if my body was trying to keep me here, now, in the present.

Fatima put her hands to her face and swayed visibly, and for a moment I thought she was about to pass out.

‘Why?’ she asked again, her voice choked. ‘Why would he do this?’

I felt Kate flinch beside me, as if Fatima’s questions were blows striking home.

‘She doesn’t know,’ I said angrily. ‘None of us do. Stop asking, OK?’

‘I think we all need a drink,’ Thea said abruptly, and she opened the bottle of whiskey Ambrose kept on the kitchen table and poured herself a tumblerful, gulping it down.

‘Kate?’

Kate hesitated, and then nodded, and Thea poured three more glasses, and topped up her own. I wouldn’t have chosen to drink, I wanted a cigarette more, but somehow when I raised the glass to my lips, I found myself gulping down the harsh spirit, feeling it burn acidly in my throat, and – somehow – it took the edge off what was happening, blurring the reality of Ambrose lying there on the rug, in front of us – dead.

‘What are we going to do?’ Fatima asked at last when the glasses were empty. The colour had come back into her face a little. She put the glass down, rattling slightly against the table as her hand shook. ‘Do we phone the police, or the ambulance …?’

‘Neither,’ Kate said, and her voice was hard. There was a shocked silence, and I knew my own face must be showing the same uncomprehending blankness that I saw reflected in the others.

‘What?’ Thea said at last. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t tell anyone,’ Kate said doggedly. She poured another glass and choked it back. ‘Don’t you get it? I’ve been sitting here since I found him trying to think of a way out of this, but if anyone knows he’s dead –’ She stopped, and put her hands to her stomach as if she had been stabbed, and were trying to staunch a terrible wound, but then she seemed to force herself on. ‘I can’t let anyone find out.’ Her voice was mechanical, almost as if she had been rehearsing these words, repeating them to herself over and over. ‘I can’t. If they find out he’s dead before I’m sixteen, I’ll be taken away, taken into care. I can’t lose my home, not on top of – on top of –’

She broke off, unable to finish, and I had the impression of someone holding themselves together with a great effort, someone who might snap and break down at any moment. But she didn’t need to say it, we knew what she meant.

Not on top of losing her only parent, her father.

‘It – it’s just a house –’ Fatima faltered, but Kate shook her head. The truth was it wasn’t just a house. It was Ambrose, from the paintings in his studio down to the red wine stains on the black boards. And it was Kate’s link to us. If she got sent away to some far-off foster home, she would lose everything. Not just her father, but us too, and Luc. She would have no one at all.

It seems … God, looking back, it seems not just stupid, but criminal. What were we thinking? But the answer was … we were thinking of Kate.

There was nothing we could do to bring Ambrose back, and even now when I weigh up the alternatives – foster care for Kate, and the Mill seized by the bank … even now, it makes a kind of sense. It was so unfair. And if we couldn’t help him, we could at least help Kate.

‘You can’t tell anyone he’s gone,’ Kate said again. Her voice was broken. ‘Please. Swear you won’t.’

We nodded, one by one, all of us. But Fatima’s brow was furrowed with worry.

‘So … what do we do?’ she asked uncertainly. ‘We can’t – we can’t just leave him here.’

‘We bury him,’ Kate said. There was a silence, the shock of her words slowly sinking in. I remember the cold of my hands, in spite of the heat of the night. I remember looking at Kate’s white, shuttered face and thinking, who are you?

But as she said the words, they seemed somehow to crystallise into the only possible course of action. What alternative did we have?

Now, looking back, I want to shake myself – the drunk, blinkered child that I was, swept along with a plan so stupid that it somehow seemed the only way out. What alternative did we have? Only a hundred different possibilities, all of them better than concealing a death and embarking on a lifetime of deceit and lies.