Everything Is Lies

Chapter One

No-one is who they say they are.

I slumped into the rumbling backseat of the N159 as it roared and puttered towards Brixton and my little flat. The top two buttons were missing from my shirt and the younger guy in a SuperDry jacket three seats up kept turning to stare at me, as if to say, go on, you can hit on me any time, it’s really not a problem.

I continued to decline this unspoken invitation, instead preferring to sink back into a fug of self-pity, all against the background of a nascent headache that had first started to pry its way into my brain somewhere around Trafalgar Square. In the window, my reflection blinked back at me, my smeared mascara making me look like a moody panda who’s made poor life choices.

Around me the bus was full of the usual late night detritus of London – drunk girls in tiny clothes, tight-trousered hipsters, weary workers on unsociable hours making their way home, nodding asleep in their seats. The unsympathetic lighting played over us all, making our skin look like meat in a butcher’s shop window.

I felt sober and exhausted and oddly hollow.

* * *

Hours earlier, Tai-Pan had been heaving, the air redolent of clean sweat and perfume and yeast and aftershave – that Friday night smell, the smell of excitement, arousal and adventure. The bar was abuzz with good-natured bellowing and delighted shrieks, and somewhere in the background music played, only the beats audible above the din.

I was out with work. James Cooper, enfant terrible of corporate architecture and our managing director, had been put forward for another design award and accordingly “impromptu drinks” had been booked for that evening.

I hadn’t wanted to come.

I’d only been working at Amity for twelve weeks, but it was already clear that there was an overwhelming culture in place of being “visible” to James, a relentlessly driven New York sociopath now on his third wife – a culture of working hard and playing hard. Personally, I could have done with working hard and then playing hard somewhere else, with different people.

It had started slowly at first, an insidious creep, but I found I was beginning to cancel my plans more and more often; first the tap class I did with Audrey, an old flatmate, faded away and then my Thursday movie nights at the Ritzy in Brixton with Veronika and Paul stuttered to a halt.

Tonight, I’d decided, would begin the fightback, no matter how many eyebrows it raised. I’d stay for an hour or so, then head off. It was still my weekend, after all.

But one cocktail became two, and then (with very little encouragement) three, and before I realised it, I was unexpectedly enjoying myself.

A large part of this was because I found myself pleasantly trapped against a wall, my back pressed against a giant reproduction of Hokusai’s The Great Wave. Benjamin Velasquez, one of the senior architects at Amity, stood in front of me, his hand braced above my head as his arm created a private, intimate space, inviting me closer to where his formal business shirt hung warm and intriguingly damp next to his skin.

I’d never really spoken with him before, but I’d noticed him in his corner office with its glass walls, and every so often I’d noticed him noticing me.

He was telling me about his recent tour of the world’s volcanoes, which his friends had booked for his thirtieth birthday.

‘I’ve never seen a volcano,’ I murmured, filled with a low wonder. I had dreamed of seeing them, but like so many things, I’d hung on for someone, some lover to see them with, and it had never quite come off.

‘There aren’t many in London, thankfully.’

‘Weren’t you scared?’ I asked. I gestured for emphasis, aware that my speech was wobbling slightly. ‘They’re unpredictable. They could do anything.’

‘Yeah,’ he replied, leaning in with a conspiratorial grin. ‘But usually they don’t. It’s quite safe. My… friend, Ellie, was terrified at first, but she soon got over it.’

‘Ellie? Who’s Ellie?’

I was drunk, I realised, and my gaze danced across his chest, up to his face with his generous lips and grey eyes and perhaps, if one were to carp, his slightly weak chin.

‘A friend. A load of us went together.’ He glanced away, as though this line of questioning bored or pained him, and I dropped it, prepared to steer the conversation back on to cooler ground.

He offered to buy me a drink, and I seized the opportunity to nip to the toilets. As I pushed the gilded door open, I saw my new friend Cleo stood before the faux baroque mirror, the careful up-do she wore for work starting to come down over her shoulders in orange-gold ringlets. She was pinning it back in place, squinting at her reflection.

‘Hello there, gorgeous,’ I remarked.

‘Ah, Sophia,’ she threw me a glance over her shoulder before resuming her work. ‘How is Benjamin Velasquez?’ She grinned, but there was something slightly tight in it. Perhaps it was simply the hairpins she was gripping in the corner of her mouth. She took them out for a second. ‘You two look like you’re getting on.’

‘We’re just chatting,’ I said, though I could feel a blush rising in my cheeks. ‘He’s telling me about volcanoes…’

I suddenly became aware of a dull buzzing in my back pocket, like a fluttering heart. A second later the ringtone started – a series of rising chimes, and digging the phone out I could see my mum’s name and picture on the tiny screen.

I regarded it carefully for a moment, as though it might explode, before answering.

I love my mum dearly, I really do, but when she phones at this time of night it usually means only one thing.

‘Hi, Mum,’ I said. The clock on the phone read 21:50.

‘Sophia, where are you?’

There was always this tiny shiver of alarm in her voice as she asked this, as though I was still a little girl and she had just looked up from one of her tasks in the gardens and noticed I was missing. ‘I tried your flat.’

‘I’m in a bar,’ I supplied, though surely she must have been able to hear the background music thumping. ‘I’m out with work.’

‘Again?’

‘Yeah,’ I scratched my temple. ‘I know. They do this a lot.’

‘Oh, right. I see.’

A long pause followed. Every time she called me like this there was a kind of bewildered impatience wafting down the line, as though I have called her instead of the other way around, and for some reason I am dancing around some deep and dangerous issue that I am refusing to share with her.

When I was a spiky, cruel teenager I used to bark, ‘Mum, what do you actually want?’ at this juncture, but it was completely pointless and always made me feel terrible. She’d tell me all in good time, whenever that was, but I didn’t have good time to spend. I had Benjamin waiting and I could hear the DJ start to spin out the first few chords of the throbbing drum and bass hit that had been the soundtrack to my and Cleo’s summer so far.

Cleo, having slid the last pin in, turned and raised an eyebrow and flashed a cheeky grin at me in farewell.

I waved her off as she left.

‘How are you, Mum? Is everything okay?’

More silence. I tried not to sigh, to be patient. I worried about my fragile, gossamer mother a lot, and lived in terror that this would be the one night she genuinely needed me.

‘I want you to come home. We have to talk.’ Her voice, as always, sounded thin and small, like something heard from the other side of an expanse of clear, still water.

‘Mum, this is not a good time.’ I sighed, tried to calm my voice. What was the point of getting upset? My mum’s my mum and it’s just the way things are.

But disappointment cut me.

I’d been sure she was getting better, and these calls, always late at night, had started to tail off over the last few months. I’d begun to let myself believe that she was finally coming to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be moving back home to Suffolk; that this constant anxiety about my whereabouts was slackening its hold on her.

Some hidden murmuring then on her end, and the old-fashioned receiver being pressed to her breast, muffling all sound for a few seconds.

‘This is different, Sophia. This is important.’

‘You always say that. Always. And then I’ll get there and it won’t be.’

‘Jared and I need to talk to you.’

That was strange. Why’s she calling my dad Jared to me? It’s an off note, a troubling ripple. ‘Mum, is something wrong? Are you two okay?’

‘Yes, we’re both fine.’

‘Then why can’t it wait until morning? We can talk then.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘There’s no way I can get out to Pulverton tonight anyway. I’m over the limit and even if I started running now, I’d never make the last train.’

Silence, then: ‘Sophia, sweetheart…’

She was always doing this. Always, always. The devil by my left ear whispered, hang up.

I glanced over my shoulder, as though someone was watching me.

‘I’m sorry, Mum, I just can’t get out there tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll have a good long chat.’

Silence, then: ‘If you feel that way, Sophia.’

‘It’s not about what I feel.’ I am trapped again, wracked with guilt for something I just can’t fix for her: her luminous, melting unhappiness, always understated and yet somehow always there, and seemingly without cure. I push the feeling down, bolt it tight. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll be in touch first thing, I promise. Goodnight.’

And I tap the screen, and like that, she is gone.
 

* * *
 

By the time the taxi rounded Millennium Way his hands were already in my bra and I was plastered to the door while he kissed me as though it was the end of the world. Both of us had neglected to put our seatbelts on and the driver was probably too mortified to remind us.

It was a terrible way to behave really, but I expect that’s why I found it so erotic.

‘Carnarvon Mill, mate,’ said the cab driver, a balding middle-aged man, who very carefully kept staring straight ahead.

Benjamin released me, and I gasped in some air, straightened my shirt while he cheerfully extracted a couple of tenners from his wallet. ‘Thanks mate, keep the change,’ he said, before drawing me out after him into the sultry night air.

We were outside one of those po-faced riverside developments that line the banks of the Isle of Dogs. Behind us the Thames lapped against the pebbles, in the wake of a party barge full of fairy lights and dancing people, speeding towards Woolwich. The thin sound of Michael Jackson’s “Gotta Be Starting Something” wavered in its wake. The air smelled of rotting wood and the brackish blood of the river.

‘Come on,’ he said, pulling me towards the lobby with its muted walls and spartan but expensive-looking pewter fittings.

There had been a lift without music, or there might have been music it was just that I was too caught up in his searching kisses to notice it, then a sense of pale corridors and dark wood doors, and I was being thrust through the one at the end into an impossibly compact open-plan penthouse flat, one large wall entirely taken up with plate glass. About two hundred feet below, the river glittered in the streetlights.

He pushed and manoeuvred me up the hardwood steps to the mezzanine.

‘Nice flat,’ I remarked, falling backwards on to the massive oak sleigh bed, pulling him down with me. ‘Lovely view.’

‘Yeah,’ he gasped, yanking my stripy work shirt over my head with a breathless inefficiency that made us both giggle. ‘I bought it through Amity.’

‘Very nice,’ I repeated, while he unbuttoned my printed trousers, tugging them down with a single swift stroke. My shoes were already gone. I had no idea when that had happened.

We were kissing again, my hands were in his shirt, scrabbling against his chest as I tried to unfasten the buttons, and then I realised:

‘Sorry, I need the loo,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’

‘What, now?’

‘You don’t want me to ask later, believe me.’

He laughed then and pointed to the only other closed door in the flat, slapping my buttocks as I hurried over to it. ‘Don’t be long!’
 

* * *
 

I stood barefoot on the cream rug, the mirror reflecting me in my pink knickers and bra. I grinned as I sat down on the toilet, my eyes sparkling, my chest and face flushed – I had chosen one of my only two matching sets for tonight. Usually when I got lucky I was wearing embarrassing mongrel underwear. Fate was smiling on me.

As I sat down, I noticed that one of the cupboard doors under the sink was hanging slightly open. I’m an architect by trade and am well aware of how these new-build riverside developments go – location is everything, but the apartments themselves are frequently poorly designed and badly fitted.

I shook my head, smiling at myself. We were not at work now.

But I couldn’t help noticing that within the cupboard glinted glass and gold. My bathroom cupboard had very similar contents.

Don’t look, Sophia.

But it was too late. I had seen.

I sorted myself out and flushed the toilet. Then I bent down, carefully opening the door. A crowd of colourful bottles, a make-up bag bursting with jars and lipsticks – all higgledypiggledy, as though they had been scooped off the counter and hidden. Next to all this was a plain white paper box.

I turned the tap above, quickly rinsing my hands, then left it running, hoping its rushing sound covered any others. Aware that this was very, very naughty of me, I picked up the box.

I already knew what it was.

The white pharmacist label read Mrs ELIZABETH VELASQUEZ, 127 Carnavon Mill, Millenium Way. I wondered if this was Ellie, the “friend” he had climbed the volcano with. The date was two weeks ago. Microgynon 30 – to be taken once daily with water.

It was the same contraceptive pill that I took.

I peeped inside the box. The blister pack for the first month was missing. She must have gone away for a few days, taken it with her.

I closed the cupboard doors and shut off the tap. In the mirror, my sparkly flush was gone, replaced by a cold, humiliated pallor.

She could have just left him.

No, I thought to myself with a dull disappointment, she’d have taken all her pills. And her makeup. She’s gone somewhere on business, most likely – wherever it is these high-flying Canary Wharf types go – and couldn’t get the bigger bottles through hand luggage so left them here.

And while the cat’s away…

You’re not the one married to her. Just pretend you didn’t see. You shouldn’t have seen. You wouldn’t have seen if you hadn’t been prying where you didn’t belong. Oh come on, it’s just a bit of fun.

If it wasn’t you it would be somebody else…

I gazed down at the marble counter. I could see the shadows left by her things now I looked for them, in little circles of water-staining.

It was hopeless, I realised. Another fucking married man, another liar by omission, his ring probably jammed somewhere in his trouser pocket. I’d turn up to work on Monday and everyone would be darting looks at me, quietly sniggering amongst themselves.

They’d seen me leave with him, after all.

Why hadn’t Cleo said something? Did she not know?

At any rate, the evening was over.

‘Hey, hurry up in there,’ he shouted through. ‘Do you want a drink?’

‘No,’ I replied, coming out, my mind made up.

He peered at me, catching on quickly. He was practically sober, I realised, or at least a good deal more sober than me.

‘Something up?’

‘Sorry, I have to go.’ I snatched my trousers up from the floor and pulled them on while he stared. Outside, the faint sound of buoy bells ringing interlaced with the splash of the river.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, but that slightly weak chin looked a little weaker right now, and his eyes were small and hard.

‘Had a change of heart.’ I plucked up my shirt, jerking it over my head.

‘What? You can’t… you can’t just wind me up like that and then walk out.’ His voice was rising.

‘Oh, I so can.’ My shoes were lying by the dresser, and I wormed my feet into them, gathering up my jacket and my bag from where they lay on the floor.

He was out of the bed, impressively naked. I felt a fleeting sense of regret for what might have been. ‘What do you think you’re playing at, you fucking mental cocktease?’

Instantly he was in front of me, too close, towering over me. His shoulders were hunched, the muscles tense, fists balled at his sides, and I understood in a whiplash moment that what he really wanted to do was hit me.

I’d realised that he was no Prince Charming while I was in the bathroom, but his sudden viciousness, his sense of entitlement, still managed to be an unpleasant surprise.

Shit, I thought, this guy is practically my boss. What have I done?

Still, he didn’t get to speak to me like that.

‘How sweet. Do you kiss your wife with that mouth?’

‘What are you talking about, you crazy bitch?’ But his anger was now laced with panic, and he sat back down on the bed.

I’d made an enemy tonight, so much was clear. And I had no idea what the fallout from that would be.

I should have been more careful.

‘Night, Benjamin,’ I said, blowing him a kiss. ‘Don’t wait up.’