Seven Lies by Elizabeth Kay

Author:Elizabeth Kay [Elizabeth Kay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780751578119
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2020-03-31T23:00:00+00:00

THE FIFTH LIE

Chapter Twenty-One

The funeral was well attended. Charles’s colleagues – mostly men with chiselled jaws and sharp, dark suits – brought their wives, all pretty and blonde in tight black dresses and patent stilettoes. They were accompanied by Charles’s secretary, Debbie, the only woman in the group over nine stone and under five foot five. She was in her sixties, small and stout, with cropped grey hair and a smart jacket straining slightly at the buttons. I had met her once before: a couple of years earlier she had come to the flat on a Friday evening to drop off some paperwork.

Charles’s school and university friends arrived at the same time, dark glasses propped on their foreheads and thin black ties hanging around their necks. They hovered at the gates of the church, finishing their cigarettes, stubbing them out on the railings and grinding the butts into the paving slabs beneath their feet. A couple of them were accompanied by children, hip-height boys in black trousers and white shirts, three of them playing together and laughing inappropriately loudly. I wondered if Charles, in his casket, was wearing a tie too, tightened around his crooked neck.

Charles’s sister, Louise, had returned from New York. Her husband had stayed behind and was taking care of their younger twins and older daughter singlehandedly for the very first time. Louise veered between panicking about their welfare – would they have been fed, washed, changed? – and trying to prove that she was suffering the most, far more than anybody else. I imagined that this was probably not the case. Nonetheless, she was gallantly performing a strange exaggerated grief. She seemed to have an endless supply of tissues and was indulging in regular mascara top-ups and was constantly hiccupping tears. Charles’s mother had been planning to attend. She’d been doing a little better, Louise had said, until suddenly she wasn’t doing better at all and was too frail, too weak for the long journey. Marnie’s parents were there. We’d expected her brother would come too, but work was chaotic, he’d said, and he couldn’t get away at such short notice and flights from New Zealand were so expensive, and he’d come over soon, he promised, when things were calmer.

Marnie didn’t seem to mind. She had been quiet in the days before the funeral, gliding from my bedroom to the kitchen to the bathroom and occasionally sitting still like a statue on the sofa in front of box sets we’d originally watched when they’d first aired many years before. She had cried very little. But she had woken in the middle of the night a number of times, sitting upright and screaming and then waking and apologising and immediately lying back down again. She was still in the eye of the hurricane, the reality of her situation spiralling around her while she stood trapped in the centre, waiting to be whipped up and spat out.

For those first few weeks, she abandoned the internet entirely, muting her notifications and ignoring any messages that seeped through that barrier.

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