Believing the Lie (5 page)

“Out. The lake. Wherever. I don’t know. I just need to get out.”

“Come on, Ian. Don’t be this way. What we have—”

“What we have is nothing.”

“That isn’t true. Come back and I’ll show you.”

But Ian knew where
showing you
would lead, which was where
showing you
always led, which was to a place having nothing to do with the change he sought. He left the house without looking back.

EN ROUTE TO BRYANBARROW
CUMBRIA

Tim Cresswell slouched in the backseat of the Volvo. He tried to close his ears to the sound of his little sister begging their mother once again to let them live with her. “Please please extra pretty please, Mummy” was the way she put it. She was, Tim knew, trying to charm their mother into thinking she was actually missing something without her children in constant attendance. Not that anything Gracie might say or the way she might say it would do any good. Niamh Cresswell had no intention of allowing them to live with her in Grange-over-Sands. She had fish to fry that had nothing to do with any responsibility she might feel towards her offspring. Tim wanted to tell Gracie this, but what was the point? She was ten years old and too young to understand the workings of pride, loathing, and revenge.

“I
hate
Daddy’s house,” Gracie was adding in hopeful good measure.
“There’re spiders
every
where. It’s dark and creaky and full of draughts and it’s got all these corners where there’re cobwebs and things. I want to live with you, Mummy. Timmy does ’s well.” She squirmed round in her seat. “
You
want to live with Mummy ’s well, don’t you, Timmy?”

Don’t call me Timmy, you stupid twit, was what Tim actually wanted to say to his sister, but he couldn’t ever get mad at Gracie when she looked at him with that expression of trusting love on her face. When he saw it, though, he wanted to tell her to harden up. The world was a shit hole, and he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t yet worked that out.

Tim saw that his mother was watching him in the rearview mirror, waiting to hear how he would answer his sister. He curled his lip and turned to the window, thinking that he could almost not blame his father for dropping the bomb that had destroyed their lives. His mother was a real piece of work, she was.

The bloody cow was acting true to character, even now, all pretence about why they were heading back to Bryan Beck farm. What she didn’t know was that he’d picked up the phone in the kitchen the exact same moment she’d taken up the phone in her bedroom, so he’d heard it all: his father’s voice asking would she mind keeping the kids another night and his mother’s voice agreeing to do so. Pleasantly agreeing, for once, which should have told his father something was up, because it certainly told Tim as much. So he was unsurprised when his mother came out of the bedroom less than ten minutes later dressed to the nines and breezily told him to pack up because his father had phoned and he and Gracie had to go back to the farm earlier that evening than usual.

“Something nice he has planned for you,” she said. “He didn’t say what. So get yourselves together. Be quick about it.”

She went on to search for her car keys, which Tim realised he should have pinched. Not for his own sake, but for Gracie’s. She damn well deserved another night with their mother if that’s what she wanted.

She was saying, “See, there’s not even enough hot water for a proper bath, Mummy. And the water
trick
les out and it’s brown and
disgusting. Not like your house where I c’n have bubbles. I do so like bubbles. Mummy, why can’t we live with
you
?”

“You know very well,” Niamh Cresswell finally said.

“No, I don’t,” countered Gracie. “Most kids live with their
mums
when their parents get divorced. They live with their mums and they
visit
their dads. And you got bedrooms for us anyways.”

“Gracie, if you want so much to have all the details about the situation, you can ask your father why it’s different for you two.”

Oh right, Tim thought. Like Dad was actually going to give Gracie the facts on why they lived on some creeped-out farm in some creeped-out house on the edge of a creeped-out village where there was nothing to do on a Saturday night or a Sunday afternoon but smell the cow shit, listen to the sheep, or—and this would be if one was
truly
lucky—chase the village ducks from their stupid duck house and their holding pen into the stream across the lane. Bryanbarrow was the end of nowhere, but it was just perfect for their father’s new life. And about that life…Gracie didn’t understand. She wasn’t meant to. She was meant to think that they took in lodgers, only there was only
one
, Gracie, and after you go to bed where do you think he really sleeps and in what bed exactly and what do you think they do there when the door is closed?

Tim tore at the back of his hand. He dug in his nails till he broke the skin and felt tiny crescents of blood bubbles form. His face was a blank, he knew, because he’d perfected that expression of absolutely nothing going on in his head. That and the hands and the damage he could do to them and his overall appearance kept him where he wanted to be, which was far away from other people and far away from everything else. His efforts had succeeded, even, in getting him out of the local comprehensive. Now he attended a special school near Ulverston, which was miles and miles and miles from his father’s house—all the better to cause a mind-boggling inconvenience to him every day, naturally—and miles upon miles from his mother’s house and that was the way he wanted it because there, near Ulverston, no one knew the truth of what had happened in his life and he needed it that way.

Tim watched the passing scenery, silent. The drive from Grange-
over-Sands to his father’s farm spun them north in the fading daylight, up through the Lyth Valley. There the landscape was patchwork: paddocks and pastures that were the green of shamrocks and emeralds and that, like a wave, rolled into the distance to swell up to the fells. On these, great outcroppings of slate and limestone burst forth, with grey scree fanning out beneath them. Between the pastures and the fells stood groups of woodland, alders that were yellow with the autumn and oaks and maples that were gold and red. And here and there erupted buildings that marked the farms: great hulking stone barns and slate-fronted houses with chimneys from which wood smoke curled.

Some miles along, the landscape altered as the wide Lyth Valley began to close in. With that closure came the advent of woods, and the leaves from their trees banked the road, which began to wind between drystone walls. It had started to rain now, but when
didn’t
it rain in this part of the world? This part of the world was
known
for its rain, and the result was moss thickly growing on the stones of the walls, ferns shoving themselves out of crevices, and lichens underfoot and on the bark of the trees.

“It’s raining,” Gracie said unnecessarily. “I hate that old house when it rains, Mummy. Don’t you, Timmy? It’s horrible there, all dark and damp and creepy and
horrible
.”

No one replied. Gracie dropped her head. Their mother made the turn into the lane that would take them up to Bryanbarrow, quite as if Gracie had not spoken at all.

The road here was narrow, and it proceeded upwards in a series of hairpin bends that carved a route through woodland of birch and chestnut trees. They passed Lower Beck farm and a disused field that was thick with bracken; they coursed along Bryan Beck itself, crossed it twice, climbed a bit more, and finally swung into the approach to the village, which lay below them, nothing much more than the juncture of four lanes giving onto a green. That it had a public house, a primary school, a village hall, a Methodist chapel, and a C of E church made it a gathering place of sorts. But only on evenings and Sunday mornings, and even then those gathered in the village either drank or prayed.

Gracie began to cry as they crept over the stone bridge. She said, “Mummy, I
hate
it here. Mummy. Please.”

But her mother said nothing, and Tim knew she wouldn’t. There were certainly feelings to consider in this matter of where Tim and Gracie Cresswell would live, but the feelings were not those of Tim and Gracie Cresswell. That was the way it was and the way it would be, at least till Niamh gave up the ghost or finally just gave up, whichever came first. And Tim wondered about this last, he did. It seemed that hate could kill a person, although when he thought about it, hate hadn’t yet killed him so perhaps it wouldn’t kill his mother either.

Unlike so many farms in Cumbria, which maintained a distance from villages and hamlets, Bryan Beck farm sat just at the edge of the village, and it comprised an ancient Elizabethan manor house, an equally ancient barn, and an even more ancient cottage. Beyond these the farm’s pastures opened up, and in these grazed sheep, although they were not the property of Tim’s father but rather belonged to a farmer who rented the land from him. They lent the farm “an authentic look,” Tim’s father liked to say, and were in keeping with “the tradition of the Lakes,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Ian Cresswell was no bloody farmer and as far as Tim was personally concerned, the stupid sheep were a great deal safer with his father keeping his distance from them.

By the time Niamh had pulled the Volvo into the drive, Gracie was in full blub mode. She seemed to think if she sobbed loud enough, their mother would turn the car around and take them back to Grange-over-Sands instead of what she had planned, which was to give them the boot just to mind-fuck their father and then dash off to Milnthorpe to body-fuck her poor twit of a boyfriend in the kitchen of his stupid Chinese takeaway.

“Mummy! Mummy!” Gracie was crying. “His car’s not even
here
. I’m scared to go inside if his car’s not here ’cause he’s not home and—”

“Grace, stop it this instant,” Niamh snapped. “You’re acting like a two-year-old. He’s gone to the shops, that’s all. There’re lights on
in the house and the other car’s here. I expect you can work out what that means.”

She wouldn’t say the name, naturally. She might have added, “Your father’s
lodger
is at home,” with that nasty emphasis that communicated volumes. But that would be to acknowledge Kaveh Mehran’s existence, which she had no intention of doing. She did say, “Timothy,” meaningfully, and inclined her head towards the house. This meant he was to drag Gracie from the car and march her through the garden gate to the door because Niamh didn’t intend to do it.

He shoved his door open. He tossed his rucksack over the low stone wall and then jerked open his sister’s door. He said, “Out,” and grabbed her arm.

She shrieked, “No!” and “I won’t!” and began to kick.

Niamh unfastened Gracie’s safety belt and said, “Stop making a scene. The whole village will think I’m killing you.”

“I don’t care! I don’t care!” Gracie sobbed. “I want to go with you, Mummy!”

“Oh, for the love of God.” Then Niamh was out of the car as well, but not to help Tim manage his sister. Instead, she grabbed up Gracie’s rucksack, opened it, and threw it over the wall. It landed—this was a mercy at least—on Gracie’s trampoline, where its contents spilled out into the rain. Among those contents was Gracie’s favourite doll, not one of those hideously misshapen fantasy women with feet in the wear-high-heels position and nippleless tits at attention but a baby doll so scarily realistic that to toss it out to land on its head in the middle of a trampoline should have been considered child abuse.

At this Gracie screamed. Tim shot his mother a look. Niamh said, “What did you expect me to do?” And then to Gracie, “If you don’t want it ruined, I suggest you fetch it.”

Gracie was out of the car in a flash. She was into the garden and up onto the trampoline and cradling her doll, still weeping, only now her tears mixed with the falling rain. Tim said to his mother, “Nice one, that.”

She said, “Talk to your father about it.”

That was, of course, her answer to everything. Talk to your father, as if he, who he was, and what he’d done comprised the excuse for every rotten thing Niamh Cresswell did.

Tim slammed the door and turned away. He went into the garden while behind him he heard the Volvo take off, bearing his mother to wherever because he didn’t much care. She could fuck whatever loser she wanted to fuck, as far as he was concerned.

In front of him, Gracie sat howling on her trampoline. Had it not been raining, she would have jumped upon it, wearing herself out, because that’s what she did and she did it every day, just as what he did was what he did and he did it every day as well.

He scooped up his rucksack and watched her for a moment. Pain in the arse, she was, but she didn’t deserve what she’d been handed. He went over to the trampoline and reached for her rucksack. “Gracie,” he said, “let’s go inside.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m not, I’m not.” She clutched her doll to her bosom, which caused a little tear in Tim’s own chest.

He couldn’t remember the doll’s name. He said, “Look, I’ll check for spiders, Gracie, and I’ll get rid of cobwebs. You can put…whatsername…in her cot—”

“Bella. She’s called Bella,” Gracie sniffed.

“All right. Bella-she’s-called-Bella. You can put Bella-she’s-called-Bella in her cot and I’ll…I’ll brush your hair. Okay? The way you like it. I’ll do it up the way you like it.”

Gracie looked at him. She rubbed her arm over her eyes. Her hair, which was a source of unending pride for her, was getting wet and soon enough it would be frizzy and unbrushable. She fingered a long and luxurious lock of it. She said, “French braids?” so hopefully that he couldn’t deny her.

He sighed. “All right. French braids. But you got to come now, or I won’t.”

“’Kay.” She scooted to the edge of the trampoline and handed him Bella-she’s-called-Bella. He stowed the doll headfirst into Gracie’s rucksack and carried this along with his to the house. Gracie followed, scuffling her feet in the gravel on the garden path.

Everything changed when they got inside, though. They went in through the kitchen at the east side of the house, where a roast of some kind stood on the top of the primitive range in the fireplace, its juices congealing in the pan beneath it. A pot next to this pan held sprouts gone cold. A salad was wilting on the draining board. Tim and Gracie hadn’t had their dinner, but by the look of things here, neither had their father.