Beautiful Liars. Isabel Ashdown
there biting down on my lower lip, fighting back the tears. But I must have carried on lying there in pain for at least another hour, writhing against the twist in my gut. Sometimes I think I must like it, to allow myself to suffer for any longer than I need to. Do I like it, the pain? Surely not.
Shortly after three a.m. I abandon sleep to make myself a cup of tea and swallow two of my antispasmodic tablets. The stomach cramps should ease in the next fifteen minutes or so, and in anticipation I cut myself a chunk of fruitcake to have with my tea, placing it on the side table as I fetch Martha’s letter. Wincing, I lower myself onto the sofa to reread it and reassure myself that I haven’t got things muddled, haven’t got it all wrong. Next, I open up my laptop and review my own—or rather Liv’s—reply, and with a mixture of relief and impatience I feel satisfied that my message to Martha was well worded. Appropriate. So why, then, I’m wondering now as I bite into my cake, hasn’t Martha replied immediately? I look at my watch, the small Timex that Dad gave me on my fifteenth birthday. It’s a child’s watch really, its pink leather strap now balding and cracked and straining at my wrist on the last hole. Really, I ought to get the strap replaced, but I can’t bring myself to part with the old one. It would seem so wrong to throw it away like any old rubbish.
I’m drifting again.
I sent the e-mail to Martha at just after ten yesterday morning, and here I am almost a whole day later, and still no reply. To distract myself I’ve been researching her on the Internet, and I’m surprised at how private she appears to be, skirting over her childhood in interviews and no mention of her missing friend Juliet anywhere to be found. I’ve added what I can to my notebook and made a mental note to spend more time delving into Martha Benn’s past. She’s really quite the mystery! When by the time I went to bed last night there was no reply from her, I thought with irritation, Well, it can’t be that important. I wrap my quilted gown closer, rearranging the belt with a cross tug. Maybe Martha has exaggerated the importance of Liv’s role. Maybe she’s playing games. Or more likely, I think with a sudden flash of embarrassment, she’s a busy woman and she hasn’t had a chance to pick up her e-mails. Perhaps she’s at one of those red carpet events you see in the glossies—an awards evening or a charity gala—or perhaps she’s been out all night, wining and dining and signing autographs. That’ll be it, I think now, feeling the pain in my stomach subside as my heart rate slows and my eyelids grow heavy; that’ll be it. As sleep tugs at me, I imagine myself in a schoolroom, dressed in a smart uniform to match my three best friends, sitting together on a table of four: Martha, Liv, Juliet, and me.
* * *
I remember my first year at infant school with clarity. I was four, one of the smallest and youngest in my class, and even now I can recall the overwhelming sense of being on the outside, separate from the other pupils in some unspeakable way. They slotted together naturally, even those who came from other places, the ones who arrived speaking different words and accents, handicapped by language, perhaps, but not by character as I was. I am aware how harsh on myself I sound, but these are simply the facts. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but many of these children were already acquainted from playgroup or nursery or from simply living in the same neighborhood. That was always going to count against me, wasn’t it, being a newcomer? And even if those children were previously unknown to one another, there was a thing—a “sameness’ about them that I lacked. A straightforward, easy-talking child-ness about them. It was a thing that allowed their arms to rest easy at their sides, their eyes to scan a crowd without fearful anticipation. A gift that let them be both noticed and blissfully unnoticed all in the same moment. I have never possessed that gift, then or since. Somehow I manage to be both invisible and horribly stand out all at once. I sometimes think this lack in me is the source of everything that is wrong in my life, every lurch of anxiety, every seizure of fear. How do you acquire that good, “easy” thing? Is it something you can be taught? Is it something I could learn now, given a fresh chance to mix in the world?
To begin with, despite my awkwardness, the other children were pleasant enough. They were so young, and looking back it seems to me now that a child’s default setting is probably one of kindness—just like those adorable Heathcote twins—until someone steers them off that path. In those first few days, some of them even tried to coax me into their playtime games of horsey or chase, but I must have put them off somehow, giving off that scent of discomfort and fear that popular children sniff out so quickly. All it had taken was one child to call me out—a beautiful boy with deep almond eyes—and I was marked as “the one.” After all, I know, there always has to be a “one,” doesn’t there? This is what we see in films and on television, what I read in my paperbacks and magazine short stories. Every group needs a “one”—an imperfect person to shine light upon their own perfections—an ugly person to hold up a mirror to their beauty. Well, I was the one. “Poopy Head!” was that boy’s war cry in the concrete playground of St. John’s infant school, and he ran from me, archly pinching his nostrils and whooping a loud “Poo-poo!” as he went. Others joined in his dance, and soon there was a small army of them waiting for me on the playground at each break, prancing at my rear like merry shadows, plucking at their noses and giggling to the chorus of “Poo-poo!” It stuck. If the teachers or playground monitors noticed, they showed no sign, and so it went on for weeks and months in its various guises, only stopping when my mother removed me from the school at the end of the academic year, never to return again. Thank goodness for Mum. She was hopeless in so many ways, but there’s no denying she rescued me from that particular hell. She stepped up to the challenge when it really counted. “We don’t need them,” she told me as we marched back home on that last day, her back straight, her aquiline nose raised to the sky. That evening we sat at the kitchen table and made plans for my homeschooling, my mother growing more excited with every jot of her pen, every plan that she hatched. “And we’ll have school trips to the Science Museum, and the Planetarium—and Sea World!” she told me, as Dad cooked spaghetti bolognese and wordlessly laid out the cutlery around us. “Just you, me, and a packed lunch for two!”
Mum looked lovelier than I’d ever seen her; she loved me so much that I thought she might explode with it, and me with her.
I stretch my leaden arms high above my head, easing out my aching limbs. I must stop dozing on the sofa like this; it plays havoc with the weakness in my neck, and taking painkillers only aggravates my delicate tummy. Shunting up to the edge of the cushions, I lift the lid on my laptop, resolving to do a bit more research on the girls. I’ve been building up a scrapbook of details, saving them to a special Pinterest board where I can view them as a whole. It’s a bit like one of those police wall charts you see on TV, where the investigating officers stick up photographs of suspects and pieces of evidence, scrawling arrows and connectors between sticky notes, building up momentum toward the inevitable eureka moment. My Investigation Wall is virtual, and visible to me alone. Already I’ve managed to track down a Year Ten photograph from a Bridge School alumni page I discovered on Facebook, although I’m struggling to work out which of the girls is Olivia. So many of the girls have that same generic ’90s look: heavy-fringed and sulky, their ties worn short and stubby, loose at the neck. Martha I recognized straight away, so familiar am I with her famous face and that thick, flowing hair—though of course she wears it darker now, cut in a sophisticated bob—and Juliet, well, it was impossible not to notice her, so strikingly beautiful was she at fifteen. Like Martha, her hair is worn loose and gently wavy, a light honey-brown against so many bottle-dyed blondes and Morticia blacks. She is a natural beauty. Hers was the first face I was drawn to, and images from historic newspaper reports were easily found online to confirm it was her. I feel a sudden urgency to track down more details for them all, to further populate my Investigation Wall, to build up my case. I’ve always harbored secret ambitions to write a crime novel, and I think perhaps all this research will serve me well as practice! At any rate, if Martha does get back to me, I need to make myself useful, to come up with some nugget of information she’ll appreciate—something that will make me indispensable. It’s vital that Martha continues to believe this is Liv she’s talking to, that it’s Liv she’s confiding in. I’ll start with a bit more digging on Martha and see where it takes me.
Just as I type the words “Martha Benn” into the search bar, an e-mail alert pops up in the top right corner of the screen. “From Martha Benn,” it