The Lying Game

My hands were cold and shaking with adrenaline, and beside me I could see Fatima looking as if she was about to be sick – or pass out.

Thea had a look of grim determination, like someone going into battle.

‘Volunteer nothing,’ she hissed as the door handle began to turn. ‘Understand? Yes/no answers. We know nothing about Am—’

And then the door swung open and we were ushered inside.

‘WELL?’

One word, just that. We sat, ranged opposite Miss Weatherby, and I felt my cheeks burn with something that was not quite shame, but close to it. Beside me, to my left, I could see Thea, looking out of the window. Her face was pale and bored, for all the world like she’d been called in to discuss name tags and lost hockey sticks, but I could see her fingers moving restlessly beneath the cover of her shirt cuffs, picking, picking relentlessly at the dry skin around her nails.

Fatima, to my right, was making no pretence at coolness. She looked as shocked as I felt, slumped down in her chair as though she could make herself shrink down to nothing. Her hair had fallen across her face as though trying to hide her fear, and she kept her eyes firmly fixed on her lap, refusing to meet Miss Weatherby’s gaze.

‘Well?’ Miss Weatherby said again, something like anger in her tone, and she gestured contemptuously at one of the papers on the desk.

My eyes flickered to the others, waiting for them to speak, but they didn’t and I swallowed.

‘We’ve – we’ve done nothing wrong,’ I said, but my voice cracked on the last word, because we had, it was just not this.

They were pictures – pictures of me, of Thea, of Fatima, of Kate, spread out across the polished wood in a way that made me feel naked and exposed as I never had when Ambrose drew us.

There was Thea, swimming in the Reach, lying on her back, her arms stretched lazily above her head. There was Kate, poised to dive from the jetty, a long slim streak of flesh, pale against the azure splash of watercolour sea. There was Luc, sunbathing naked on the jetty, his eyes closed, a lazy smile on his lips. There were all five of us, skinny-dipping in the moonlight, a tangle of limbs and laughter, all pencil shadows and bright moonlit splashes …

My eyes went from one to the next, and with each sketch the scenes came back to me, leaping off the paper into my mind’s eye as clear and fresh as when we were there – feeling the cool of the water, the heat of the sun on my skin …

The last one, the one closest to Miss Weatherby’s hand, was me.

I felt my throat close and my cheeks burn.

‘Well?’ Miss Weatherby said again, and her voice shook.

They had been chosen, that much was clear. Out of all of the hundreds of drawings Ambrose had done of us curled on the sofa in pyjamas, or eating toast in dressing gowns at his table, or stomping in boots and mittens across a frost-flecked field, whoever sent these had picked out the most incriminating examples – the ones where we were naked, or seemed to be.

I looked at the one of myself, bent over, painting my toenails, at the curve of my spine, the ridges drawn with such care that it seemed as if you could reach out and touch them, feel the knots. I had been wearing a halter neck that day, in fact. I remembered it – the heat on my spine, the knot of the top digging into my neck, the acrid smell of the pink polish in my nostrils as I stroked on the lacquer.

But in the drawing I was seated with my back to the viewer, with the hair on my neck hiding the strings of the top. It had been picked not for what it was, but for what it looked like. It had been chosen with care.

Who had done this? Who would want to destroy Ambrose like this, and us along with him?

You don’t understand, I wanted to say. I knew what she thought – what anyone would think, seeing those drawings, but she was wrong. So horribly, horribly wrong.

It wasn’t like that, I wanted to sob.

But we said nothing. We said nothing while Miss Weatherby railed at us about personal responsibility and the conduct of a Salten girl, and asked us again and again and again for a name.

And we said nothing.

She must have known. There was no one who could draw like that, except maybe Kate. But Ambrose rarely signed his rough sketches and perhaps she thought that if she could just get us to say the words out loud …

‘Very well then; where were you last night?’ she said at last.

We said nothing.

‘You had no permission to leave the school and yet you broke out of bounds. You were seen, you know.’

We said nothing. We only sat, ranged together, taking our refuge in muteness. Miss Weatherby folded her arms and as the painful silence stretched, I felt Fatima and Thea exchange a quick glance at my side, and I knew what they were wondering. What did it all mean, and how long could we keep this up?

A knock at the door broke into the hush, making all us jump, and all our heads turned, as the door opened and Miss Rourke came into the room, a box in her hands.

She nodded at Miss Weatherby, and then tipped the contents onto the table in front of us, and it was then that Thea broke her silence, her voice high with fury.

‘You searched our rooms! You bitches.’

‘Thea!’ Miss Weatherby thundered. But it was too late. All the pathetic contraband – Thea’s hip flask, my cigarettes and lighter and Kate’s wrap of weed, the half-bottle of whiskey Fatima had kept under her mattress, a packet of condoms, the copy of The Story of O and the rest of it – they all lay spilled over the desk, accusing us.

‘I have no choice,’ Miss Weatherby said heavily. ‘I will be taking this to Miss Armitage. And given a large proportion of this was found in her locker, where is Kate Atagon?’

Silence.

‘Where is Kate Atagon?’ Miss Weatherby shouted, so that I blinked, and felt tears start.

‘We have no idea,’ Thea said contemptuously, turning her eyes from the window to rest on Miss Weatherby. ‘And the fact that you don’t either says volumes about this school, don’t you think?’

There was a long pause.

‘Get out,’ Miss Weatherby said at last, the words hissing between her teeth. ‘Get out. You will go to your rooms and stay there until I send for you. Lunch will be sent up. You will not speak to the other girls and I will be telephoning your parents.’

‘But –’ Fatima said, her voice quavering.

‘That’s enough!’ Miss Weatherby shouted, and suddenly I could see that she was almost as distraught as we were. This had happened on her watch, whatever it was, and it would be her neck on the block as much as ours. ‘You’ve had your chance to speak, and since you didn’t want to answer my questions, I’m certainly not going to listen to your objections. Go to your rooms, and think about your behaviour and what you’re planning to say to Miss Armitage, and to your parents when she sends for them, as I have no doubt she will.’

She stood at the door, held it wide, and her hand on the door handle trembled, ever so slightly, as we traipsed out, one after the other, still in silence, and then looked at each other.

What had just happened? How had those drawings got into the hands of the school? And what had we done?

We didn’t know, but one thing was clear. Whatever it was, our world was about to come crashing down, and it had taken Ambrose with it.

IT IS LATE. The curtains, what curtains the Mill possesses, anyway, are drawn. Liz went home hours ago, picked up by her dad, and after she left Kate bolted the door of the Mill for the first time I could remember, and I told them about the conversation with Jess Hamilton.

‘How do they know?’ Fatima asks desperately. We are huddled together on the sofa, Freya in my arms. Thea is smoking cigarette after cigarette, lighting one from the butt of the other, breathing the smoke out across us all, but I can’t bring myself to tell her to stop.

‘The usual way, I’d imagine,’ she says shortly. Her feet, curled next to my hip, feel cold as ice.

‘But,’ Fatima persists, ‘I thought the whole point of us agreeing to leave mid-term was so that it wouldn’t get out. Wasn’t that the point?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kate says wearily. ‘But you know what the school gossip circuit is like – perhaps an old teacher told an old girl … or one of the parents found out.’