A Game For All The Family (12 page)

I want to jump on top of him and beat him to a puree.

“You have no idea how obvious it is to me that you’re lying,” I say. “Just as, this morning, it was clear to me that Lesley was lying. It couldn’t be more obvious if you all wore T-shirts emblazoned with the words ‘We’re all lying!’ Exclamation mark.”

“I have to go, Justine Merrison. See?” He grins. “I’m not that bad with names—I’d remember a George Donbavand. There isn’t one at Beaconwood. There never has been.”

What can I do to stop him walking away? Nothing. My imaginary watermelon, so effective against Helen, is useless now. I can’t throw it at Mr. Goodrick’s head and knock him out.

Marilyn Monroe
.

Why did that name come into my mind? That’s right: the pictures on the wall behind me. Did I see . . .

I turn and look. Marilyn’s one of the better efforts. Beneath her face—half photograph, half oil painting—is the handwritten name of the artist: “Fleur D.”

“What about Fleur?” I call after Craig Goodrick.

He stops, but doesn’t turn around.

He doesn’t know what to say. Lesley told him to lie about George, but she didn’t mention Fleur. He has to decide for himself, without knowing what she’d want him to do.

“Fleur Donbavand, sister of the nonexistent George,” I say. “A pupil at this school. Look, this is her portrait of Marilyn Monroe. The one that says ‘Fleur D’ at the bottom.”

Goodrick stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Yeah, Fleur,” he says with not a trace of guilt. “She’s a talented artist.”

“So that I’m clear: you’re talking about Fleur Donbavand?”

“Yeah. She’s in Year 12.”

“Yet not two minutes ago you pretended not to recognize the surname Donbavand. Dunnerband, you said.”

“I didn’t hear you properly.” He stares at me defiantly.

“Still. When I repeated the name, you didn’t jump in with, ‘No, I don’t know a George but I do know a Fleur Donbavand.’ ”

“I was in a hurry. You asked about George. I don’t know any George Donbavand. I answered the question you asked. You didn’t ask about Fleur so I didn’t bring her up.” Goodrick starts to walk away again.

“What do you think Fleur will say if I ask her about her brother?” I shout after him.

He’s gone: vanished around a corner. It would be undignified to chase him. Pointless, too.

Should I burst into the Year 8 class on my right and demand the truth? Surely someone in the room would raise their hand and say “Me!” if I blurted out, “Who knows George Donbavand?”

Of course he’s real. There’s no doubt. If Fleur exists, then George must.

Years ago, while working on a TV thriller, I spent some time with a psychotherapist who profiled for the police. She told me the most dangerous and frightening liars are those who attempt to deceive even when there’s no chance of convincing anyone, who savor the inability of the honest world to believe they would maintain their pretense in the face of proof to the contrary.

It chills me to think that this category now includes the head of Ellen’s school and her form tutor.

I hear glass smashing. Not loud, like a window breaking, but small and contained. The blare of an alarm fills the corridor. I flatten myself against the wall as children start to pour out of classrooms, guided by teachers pointing and mouthing inaudible words.

Lesley Griffiths hurries past me, then turns back. She frowns and gestures at me. “Why are you standing still? You need to leave the building. Fire alarm,” she mouths.

“It was you,” I say to her departing back. “You smashed the glass, to get me out.”

She can’t hear me. I can’t hear myself.

Chapter 4

Pas Devant les Enfants

After the unknown miscreant tried to kill Perrine by hanging her from a tree, everything changed for the Ingrey family. Later that same night, once Perrine had been checked by a doctor and the rope burns on her neck had been attended to, Bascom and Sorrel said something to their three daughters that they had never said before: “We need to talk in private, girls. It is likely to take a long time. You’ll have to forage in the fridge and pantry for your own supper.”

Lisette, Allisande and Perrine were shocked. Their home, Speedwell House, was one that had never contained an apartheid system with the grown-ups on one side and the children on the other. It always struck them as peculiar, when they visited the homes of friends, that other families behaved in this way. Lisette’s friend Mimsie Careless, for example, had parents who ended conversations midsentence the instant she walked into a room, plastered bright smiles on their faces and said in falsely hearty voices, “Hello, darling! How lovely to see you!” For years, Lisette had been convinced that Mr. and Mrs. Careless were spies for a foreign power, until Sorrel had explained to her that a lot of adults suffer from weird neuroses that they keep at bay by depriving their children of important information about life.

Allisande had a friend called Henrietta Sennitt-Sasse whose mother wouldn’t answer any questions in front of her daughter, not even the most innocent ones. If Bascom or Sorrel drove Allisande to Henrietta’s house to drop her off and happened to ask Mrs. Sennitt-Sasse a question like, “Oh, is that a new lavender plant I see in your front garden?” or “What do you think of Marathon bars changing their name to Snickers?,” Mrs. Sennitt-Sasse would tighten up her face and mutter through shrunken lips, “
Pas devant les enfants
,” which means “Not in front of the children” in French. Only after Allisande and Henrietta had gone up to Henrietta’s room would Mrs. Sennitt-Sasse answer, once she’d checked that the girls were nowhere in earshot.

The Ingreys had great fun mercilessly mocking the Sennitt-Sasse approach. Sorrel would rock with laughter as she told her family the punchline each time: “And after all that, and with me waiting on tenterhooks to hear this alluring secret that couldn’t be spoken of in front of little pitchers with big ears, all the stupid woman said was, ‘Yes, it’s a new lavender. I bought it half price from the garden center on the weekend. There was a sale.’ ”

Until the day that someone tried to hang Perrine from a tree, Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey had been willing to discuss anything and everything in front of their three daughters. They did not hide strong opinions, or critical ones. In truth, they didn’t have very many opinions that were not strong and critical, and it would have been ridiculous never to allow the girls to hear them speak! In the Ingrey household, the children were not protected from contentious or controversial subjects, because almost anything you cared to name was contentious and controversial for the Ingreys, from when to set off for an important event (with at least an hour to spare in case something goes wrong, insisted Bascom; no, at the very last possible moment to avoid wasting time, countered Sorrel) to how best to handle the family finances (employ an expensive accountant to save yourself a lot of trouble, said Sorrel; keep pernickety, encyclopedic records and fill in every form yourself in order to save money, said Bascom).

I hope you will understand, then, that for the three girls to be told to make themselves scarce while their parents had a private discussion—in their bedroom with the door shut and locked—was so unusual, it was frightening. For Lisette, Allisande and Perrine, being excluded in this way and being able to make out only whispering and hissing was nearly as traumatic as the whole hanging-from-a-tree-attempted-murder incident. Yes, even for Perrine.

The girls didn’t go down to the kitchen and forage for their supper. Instead, they pressed their ears against their parents’ bedroom door to see if they could hear what was going on. At first they couldn’t, but then, as Bascom and Sorrel grew more irate, their voices became more audible.

“But we agreed!” Sorrel yelled. “You promised: next time it would be my turn first!”

“Will you listen to what you’re saying?” Bascom snapped. “How
can
it be your turn first? How would that work, exactly?”

Lisette, Allisande and Perrine started to cry. They had never heard their parents verbally attack each other in this way before. You see, although Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey argued and disagreed about everything, they never fought. It was always perfectly friendly and no one ever got upset. Disagreement, traditionally, was something they enjoyed. It was their hobby.

Until now.

“It is scientifically impossible for you to go first!” Bascom bellowed. “It’s exactly like the business with Malachy Dodd—you wanting him never to come around again and me saying he should come around one last time. I didn’t
want
him in the house again, or indeed at all—in an ideal world, I wouldn’t have let him cross my threshold! But we’d agreed he might be good for Perrine. And we had to do it my way first, because the alternative was conceptually and practically impossible. The same is true in this instance!”

“But you promised that next time,
no matter what
, I would have my turn first,” Sorrel sobbed.

“All right then, dear wife, tell me this: If you have your turn first, how on earth will we arrange for me to have mine?”

“We won’t be able to. On this occasion, you will have to accept that you won’t get a turn.”

“No!” Bascom roared. “In any other circumstance I might agree, but this is the most important decision we’ve ever had to make. The stakes have never been higher!”

On hearing the word “stakes,” Lisette, Allisande and Perrine remembered how hungry they were and that they hadn’t had any dinner. They didn’t care, though. They were all three quite happy to starve to death if their family life was going to be this miserable from now on.

“It’s because the stakes are so high that I’m going to insist upon this point of procedure,” Sorrel said to Bascom. “You vowed that, no matter what, it would be my turn first next time. I intend to hold you to that.”

“You can’t,” Bascom told her. “Without my cooperation, your plan won’t work. I simply won’t go along with it! You need me, and you’d realize that if you weren’t so stubborn. Do you want to ruin all of our lives?”

“You know what I want.” Sorrel’s voice was weary now.

“Darling,” said Bascom, still sounding strict but not quite so angry. “Listen to me and try to keep an open mind. Let’s try my way first. If it works, you won’t want to have your turn afterward. If you still want to, that will mean that my method hasn’t worked. Then, I promise you, you will have my full cooperation and we can do it your way without destroying our family. You know it makes sense.”

“I hate sense!” Sorrel protested. “I’m not sure I can bear to wait!”

“Deep down, you know it’s the right and fair thing to do,” said Bascom.

“Oh, stop being so . . .
wise
!” Sorrel snapped at him.

Lisette, Allisande and Perrine knew that their mother had given in. Soon the only thing that could be heard through the locked door was kissing and affectionate murmurs. There was some more crying, but it was “Wasn’t that horrible?” crying rather than “I hate you” crying.

About twenty minutes later, the bedroom door started to creak open. The three girls sprinted across the landing and leapt down the stairs so as not to be caught eavesdropping. They pulled open the fridge door, grabbed random soft cheese triangles and slices of ham and stuffed them into their mouths to make it look as if they were getting supper on their own.

Their parents appeared in the kitchen in the fullness of time. They were smiling and holding hands. “Girls,” they said, “we have an announcement to make.”

5

N
obody is dressed. Dressing, moving, would require deciding what to do, and we don’t know how. Our drinks—one coffee, one hot water with lemon and honey and one orange juice—sit untouched in front of us.

By now, if all were well and this were a normal weekday morning, Ellen would be in her forest-green school uniform and on the bus, almost at Beaconwood. Alex, in torn jeans and a sweatshirt, would be asleep on a train from Berlin to Hamburg, en route to his next German concert.

I should be the only one in pajamas, sitting at the kitchen table. Instead it’s all three of us, which feels horribly wrong. We can’t all drop out of life and do nothing. The idea terrifies me. I need to sort out this mess so that Alex can go back to singing and Ellen to school. Not Beaconwood. Somewhere else. Somewhere sane.

Which school will George Donbavand go to next? I’ll send Ellen there. I need the phone number of his new school, now, and I’m furious that I don’t have it.

It’s selfish of me, but I’m panicking—on the verge of tears because I haven’t got the house to myself and don’t know when I next will. I want to be able to do nothing alone, in this enormous house that I bought for that specific purpose—or lack of purpose—without anybody in my way. I can’t have Alex and Ellen milling around here too. I’ll have to . . .

What? What will you do? It’s their house as much as yours.

I need to be with nobody as much as I need to do Nothing—for several hours a day at least. I didn’t know this about myself until this morning.

Maybe I’ll pretend to get a job—go out and spend all day Monday to Friday sitting on a bench somewhere far from home. I can do my relaxing obscenity-meditation anywhere; it doesn’t have to be at Speedwell House.

Now that my former career is not my only source of anger, I can add a new verse to the mantra:
fuck Beaconwood, fuck Lesley Griffiths, fuck Craig Goodrick, fuck George Donbavand’s mother who caused the trouble in the first place by being the kind of person who can’t be told about a lost coat. Oh, and fuck my anonymous caller.

Ellen still insists it’s someone from school. I asked her about it again last night while we waited up together for Alex to come home. “Mrs. Griffiths has a grudge against the Donbavands,” she said. “It has to be her.”

I lost count of the number of times I pleaded, “
What
has to be her? But
why
?” like an irritating toddler.