The Liar's Chair (29 page)

A scraping noise. I lift my head to see John pulling the small boat on to the shingle. Waves lap the rubber sides of the dinghy and the man stands in the water with rolled-up trousers jammed at
his fat calves.

Will and I pull apart. From his pocket he takes a small pair of scissors. I flinch. ‘For your hair,’ he says. ‘I need something to give to David. I’m sorry, I don’t
know what else to take.’

I grab the scissors and cut tiny clumps of hair, some of it matted with blood, but the scissors are small and blunt so I give up after a while.

‘How do I look?’ I smile, knowing it must be bad.

He holds me in his gaze before answering. ‘You look fine. You look like you.’

I hand the tufts to Will and he stuffs them in his pocket, then I give him Seamus’s broken watch.

‘David knows I’d never part with this.’ I close Will’s fingers over the pieces of metal and glass.

As soon as I climb into the dinghy, John pushes us out into the small waves. He leaps on board leaving Will on the shore with inches of water sloshing round his trousers and shoes. The beach
recedes.

‘I need your phone, throw it to me,’ Will calls. ‘He can trace you through your phone.’

I dip my hand into my pocket and throw the phone to Will, watching him bend into the shallow waves to retrieve it.

‘Sorry,’ I shout.

He laughs, dripping wet. ‘It’s OK, I forgive you.’

It takes less than a minute to get to the fishing boat, and John helps me on board before securing the smaller vessel to the back. He gives me a blanket and pours me coffee from a flask. Hot
sweet liquid spreads through the sponge of my chest, and the pain that’s travelled round my body for months begins a slow trickle away from my gut. A radio in the cockpit crackles a carol,
then a monotone voice echoes a prayer.

‘There’s a bit of room down there,’ John says, signalling to a space through a hatch. It looks cosy, and I imagine lying down and rocking with the waves into a deep sleep with
the hatch shut, like a cat who’s found a safe place. ‘There’s a bowl and a couple of bottles of water if you want to get cleaned up.’ He lifts the furred anchor and makes
his way to the wheel, revving the boat with a judder. I stand. The boat moves out into the sea. I lurch and sit again, watching the shoreline drift and bob.

Will’s figure is a silent pillar on the beach. He stands for a few minutes, then turns and walks to my car. The vehicle doesn’t start immediately. I measure the land between my
finger and thumb, and it’s an inch high before the dot of my car twists in a circle and pulls away from the beach.

No one asked many questions when I arrived in Ireland a little under six months ago, they knew better than to pry into the life of a windswept woman with cuts on her face. My
appearance told all the stories they needed to know – a bad marriage, abuse, violence – and though dramatic, my situation was not unique; how many women are squirrelled away in
desperate homes. No one needed to know how deep my own story went, but if anyone did ask, I simply moved on to another B & B or cheap hotel. By the time I found this house, my face had healed.
There’s a light scar on my lower lip, but over time it’s fading.

The room I’ve taken is small; it’s all I want and all I need. It was luck really that found this place: the village across an ocean hundreds of miles from where I know, a notice in a
post-office window and an elderly woman who needed help. Sarah gives me a little extra on top of my room and board. There’s no tax to pay, no National Insurance. No references needed.

Sarah lives in a two-bedroom cottage on the edge of farmland, built for farmhands, and she worked in the dairy all her life. After her husband died, the farmer let her stay on. She was two steps
away from ending her days in a care home when she found me. Or rather, I found her. I beat her door down with kindness, knowing that this was the gift I’d been looking for. Sarah must have
recognized the weary traveller in me and decided she would let me stay. I cook, clean, give her a weekly bath, and in return she asks no questions. Between us is the unspoken contract that our
histories cannot be simplified into conversation. I’ve settled into this new-found freedom called anonymity. I am safe. And I’ve finally put my pin on the map.

It took me a couple of months before I had the courage to write to Claire. The letter I eventually sent was anonymous, and I explained I was in an exile of sorts, a fitting banishment for my
crime. I told her how sorry I was, not only for the accident, but for the way in which I’d delivered the news on the phone that day. ‘I was not in my right mind,’ I wrote. I
informed her of the town where they’d been holding Seamus’s body, so she’d have been able to mark his grave by now, to release him from conjecture – my own as much as
everyone else’s – and return him to the ground. Let nature take its course. For a man who left his family for no good reason, that was the best I could do.

From the back window of Sarah’s cottage we look out over a new estate of houses set round a crescent. Children cycle the pavements, their calls reaching high over the rooftops, and cars
come and go in the mornings like busy insects. The farmer has sold off one corner of a field, but more land is set to go, and the beginning of another street is already laid; a runway through the
grass that leads nowhere. Soon the low hedge round our back garden won’t be enough to keep us private, and we’ll have to put up a fence. Or perhaps I’ll be forced to embrace
community and discover that it’s not so bad after all.

Each day when I’ve finished my chores and set Sarah up in front of the TV, I put on boots and my dad’s old coat and walk into the hills. All those years I’ve spent locked
inside watching the filthy weather, and it’s never as bad when you finally get out. Sometimes I bus part of the way, but if I plan the route properly I can walk a decent stretch of the
journey and make it back in time for supper. I’ve gained a good knowledge of the local landscape, so the challenge is always to go deeper, to find lost tracks and quiet hills. There I can
witness the eloquence of the hidden world: snake lines of birds flipping and curving in the sky, cloud-shadows skating down a hillside, fat blades of grass luminescent with the sun on their backs.
One day I came across the perfectly preserved skull of a rabbit. It was bleached clean and lay under a hedge, almost as if it had been placed there as a gift, but I didn’t take it home. I
have no use for dead things.

About once a week I take the bus to the next big town to do the food shopping, and while I’m there I book out the computer in the library to spy on David. I know all the passwords he used
to use, and I’m relieved that he must truly believe I’m dead because the passwords are all the same: Portia; Petra; Rellet, which is Teller spelt backwards. He still uses the date of
our wedding as one of the access codes, but I’m sure this is more out of habit than sentimentality; he never did have much of an imagination. Like air traffic control, I’ve locked on to
the coordinates of his many online accounts and I am guiding him down to land. ‘I see you, David.’ He thinks he’s flying to the Caribbean but when he descends through the layer of
clouds he’ll find he’s not even left the airport. I stalk the numbers on the screen as they change weekly, the money filtering through the accounts, in and out of different countries,
and I print off as much as I can. If I am able, I forward statements to my private email where I still hold the photos of David taking drugs. The embarrassment David will suffer from this outing of
his petty habit will be worse than his shame over the conviction for fraud that’s coming his way. And then, of course, there’s the greater damnation of the ledger I posted to Will.
Names, dates and amounts it won’t be hard for the police to decipher, and which will put David away for longer than a bit of money laundering. I trust Will to guard these accounts until the
time is right, but I can’t act or ask anything of him until I know he is safe. Of all things, I wish Will safe.

I regularly check the feed of local news from where I used to live. Thankfully, Tyrone’s conviction for dealing didn’t stick, so already the police must have an inclination that
something is amiss. And a pair of rare breeding birds have been discovered in the woods, forcing Alex’s development to be put on hold, again. I like to think the animals are tucked into the
branches of one of Seamus’s trees, and the group of activists have ringed the nest with their camp. Alex will be furious at another obstacle to his family’s onslaught on that land, and
my plan is to get the incriminating evidence to the police before the chicks have left the roost. I wonder how long it will take for roots to break through the concrete that’s already been
laid, and for weeds to colonize the low walls of Alex and David’s dream. Two men felled with one stone. Return the woods to Seamus. I owe him that at least.

Sarah is dozing in the other room in front of the white noise of the TV. Soon it will be time for her evening meal. As always, it’s hard to draw the curtains against the outside. Through
the window a light rain fluffs the air. I want the drops to fall on my face as they did at the bay with Will. Every time I remember those few seconds we shared, the moment comes back as an ecstasy
of feeling. I would give everything to be at the source again.

Since I’ve been away, every few weeks I’ve sent Will an anonymous postcard, and on each one I’ve written a small part of my address buried in the text. First I sent the house
name; next was half the street. Soon I’ll send the town cut up across a couple of cards, then the postcode divided into digits. Not too much information at once – just in case
he’s being watched – but enough so he can piece the address together one day and come and find me.

If he wants to. Please let him want to.

On each postcard I place the stamp at a right angle next to his surname. The Victorians used this as code for words that were forbidden. The position and angle of my stamp means ‘I am
longing for you’. I’ve rehearsed the stolen phrase as a whisper. If I meet Will again, when I do, I will say it in my own words. After that I’ll tell him the rest: how, when I
arrived on this island and stopped searching for a place I couldn’t name, what followed was a rushing backdraught to my former self, a refuge, where I am learning to be tender towards
imperfection. For who are we if not the sum of our experience? We can choose what face to show the world, but there is only one face we can show ourselves. Seamus walked in incessant circles, and
each evening he wound up as the same lonely old man.

A fighter jet thunders overhead. The plane’s roar mutes all other sound for seconds after it’s passed, then piece by piece life trickles back in: the canned laughter from the TV in
the other room, a car driving into the distance, the fairy-tap of raindrops on the glass.

At any point I can choose to leave this place and enter the day, and all the days that follow. Time lays itself open in front of me. The future is a bold new country.

Huge thanks to my agent, Sue Armstrong, for her passion and guidance, and to my editor, Sophie Orme, for her kindness, and whose great insight has honed my words. Thank you to
Maria Rejt for being a believer, and to all at Mantle and Pan Macmillan for their continued support and enthusiasm.

Eternal thanks to Kathy Andrew, Jacqui Burns, Laura Darling, Rosalind De-Ath, Glenys Jacques, Dionne McCulloch and Kate Wesson; my comrades in words. This book would never have made it past the
first draft without your motivation, persistence and fine tuning.

Susannah Waters and Catherine Smith, most excellent tutors on the Creative Writing Programme, thank you for your continued guidance and encouragement.

Thanks to Phil Brigly, Mark Brown, Elizabeth Davidson, Dr Sam Fraser, Shawn Katz, Detective Constable Brad Lozynski, Julian Male, Rob Stapleton, Graham Tyler and Nick Watts, who answered my
questions with patience and wisdom. All errors are my own.

To my mum and mad – Jean and Terry – who were as surprised as I that there was a book in me. Thank you for never telling me what to think, and for keeping the faith with an endless
supply of chicken soup and childcare. To Ben and Luke, dear brothers, thank you for being at my side and teaching me the power of the gentle man. And to great-grandfather Charlie H – the
bloodline continues!

To Bea and Billy. You are brilliant; you rock my world. Thank you for being so happy for me, and for your enthusiasm always to eat pizza.

And to Rob –
amore mio
– for love, support, friendship and jokes. Thank you for creating the space and time for me to write, and for refusing to let me give up.

THE LIAR’S CHAIR

Rebecca Whitney studied Creative Arts at Nottingham Trent University. After working for a record company, she switched to film production, moving up from tea girl to producer, and
making music videos and documentaries. Since relocating to Brighton, she has completed the Creative Writing Certificate at Sussex University, and now lives and writes by the sea with her husband
and two children.

@RebeccaJWhitney