Perfect Liars Page 3

  ‘I checked it while you were getting your stuff,’ said Georgia solemnly.

  Lila reached forward and pulled the piece of paper off the noticeboard, taking the pins with it. They pinged to the carpet.

  ‘Lila? What are you doing?’ asked Georgia.

  Lila said nothing. She stared at the piece of paper, holding it between her hands, as if her eyes could erase the Arial size-twelve font if she read it enough times.

  ‘Let me see it,’ said Georgia, snatching the paper from Lila’s hands. Lila yelped. ‘Fuck off, Georgia, paper cuts!’

  Lila held her hand up. There was an almost invisible slice between her thumb and index finger which had determinedly filled with blood.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Georgia. ‘Accident.’

  Lila put her hand to her lips and licked at the blood. It made her feel a bit sick.

  ‘It’s a mistake,’ said Lila. ‘That’s all. It’s a mistake.’

  ‘Are our names on the door? We need to go and look.’

  Lila took the stairs two at a time, her heart thudding in her body. She sprinted down the third-floor corridor, arriving outside the door of the triple dorm, the dorm they had known was theirs. Georgia’s heavy breathing caught up with her. They stared at the names, mounted in little metal frames on the door.

  ‘It’s not a mistake,’ whispered Lila.

  ‘Nancy is going to murder someone,’ panted Georgia. ‘How the fuck could this happen?’

  Nancy was always the last to arrive, every term. She didn’t like the ‘faffing’ that came with unpacking and running around asking about other people’s holidays. Lila and Georgia watched through the wide windows at the front of the boarding house as the people-carrier pulled up. Lila had clasped her knees to her chest and was pulling at the loose threads at the ankles of her tracksuit bottoms. It was cold in the hall, draughty. But they didn’t know where else to go. The common room was full of giggling and chattering, and going to one of their rooms clearly wasn’t an option. Their bags – Lila’s trunks and bin bags, and Georgia’s one neat suitcase – sat forlornly abandoned in the corridor outside their dorm. Or rather, not their dorm.

  ‘She’s here,’ said Georgia unhelpfully.

  Nancy stepped out, thinner than ever in her usual outfit – skinny jeans, a V-neck Ralph Lauren jumper and ballet pumps. They watched as she casually tipped the driver.

  ‘Where’s her stuff?’ asked Lila.

  ‘She has it sent on ahead usually,’ said Georgia, who sounded in awe of this.

  ‘What are we going to tell her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Lila honestly. Not for the first time, it struck Lila how weird it was to be afraid of her friend. She’d never known anyone who could make her feel so nervous or so guilty as Nancy did. But then, she’d never known anyone like Nancy before.

  ‘Why are you sitting here?’ asked Nancy as she pushed through the doors. ‘Let’s go upstairs. Are my things in our room?’

  Lila looked at Georgia, waiting for her to speak, but nothing came.

  ‘Hello?’ asked Nancy, standing above them. ‘What’s going on?’

  Georgia clearly wasn’t about to step up. ‘It’s the dorms,’ Lila said quietly. ‘We didn’t get the triple.’

  Nancy raised her eyebrows slightly, tipping her head to one side. ‘What?’

  Georgia finally spoke: ‘They put Lila in it. With Heidi Bart and Jenny McGuckin.’

  Both girls watched Nancy’s face as she took in the information. What would happen next? With Nancy it was impossible to tell if she would laugh or scream. Or lash out.

  ‘That,’ said Nancy, ‘is unacceptable.’

  NOW

  Nancy

  Nancy tried to tune out the sound of Brett’s breathing. He didn’t mean to breathe loudly, she was aware of that, but that didn’t make it any less annoying. He’s perfect, she reminded herself. He’s young, and beautiful, and funny and perfect and they will die of jealousy when they see him. That was the point of him. So, a little audible breathing could be forgiven.

  ‘Can we have the radio on?’ she said, leaning forward to catch their driver’s attention. Perhaps Brett had picked up some bug on the flight over. She thought about reaching into her bag and covering her hands with sanitizer, but it didn’t fit with the persona she’d created for him. He regarded her as more devil-may-care than that. A pleasing contrast to the uptight woman he had dated back in Boston. Her friends would think it was hilarious, the idea that anyone would think she was laid-back. But in the States not insisting on being picked up at her apartment before she went on a date made her happy-go-lucky. It was nice to be viewed that way. She’d never been seen as easy-going before.

  People had teased her all the way through school and university for being organized, for being ‘OCD’. It was true, she liked to arrive promptly and complete tasks in good time. It was never entirely clear to her why that was such a laughable characteristic, or how it had anything in common with a disorder. Teachers had smiled indulgently at her early homework in the same way they’d laughed at Lila’s chronic lateness.

  ‘So this is London,’ said Brett, watching the buildings flick past him through the window. ‘I can’t believe I’m actually here.’ Nancy put her hand over his, trying to find his awe at the suburbs of West London endearing.

  ‘It’s the suburbs. It’s pretty hideous actually.’

  ‘I like it,’ he said simply, and went back to leaning his perfect forehead on the window.

  They were going to be late. Well, not late exactly – an invitation for eight meant eight thirty. But they weren’t going to be prompt. They hadn’t been able to find the car she had booked to collect them from the airport. Brett had sauntered around the terminal, looking for Nancy’s name on a board, cheerfully carrying everything he needed for the entire trip – the weekend with Georgia and then their jaunt to Paris – in a small duffle bag. She had bitten her lip to stop herself from shouting at him. She’d been on best behaviour the entire time they had been together, but she had been able to feel it brewing, threatening to explode, his constant calm infuriating.

  But she knew it wasn’t the taxi situation which was the problem. The real problem was that Brett was about to meet her friends. He had asked her about it on the plane, even though she had put on an eye mask, hand cream and earplugs – as much of a do not disturb sign as anyone could provide. She had been worried he was going to ask her if she wanted to join the Mile-High club, which she absolutely didn’t. Brett was young and he had never left America before. He’d barely even been on a plane. It was the kind of sweet, stupid thing he would like. But to her surprise, that hadn’t been the question. Instead, he had managed to ask the right thing: ‘Are you nervous about me meeting your friends?’ She had said yes, and had found herself surprised by how much she enjoyed telling him the truth. Or at least, part of the truth.

  He had spoiled it after that, though. ‘Are you worried they’re going to tell me all kinds of terrible stories about what you got up to at school?’ And then he’d grinned, showing off two rows of perfect American orthodontics. Her stomach had tightened and she’d let out a nervous giggle, hoping he wouldn’t realize quite how close to the truth he was. It was fine, she had told herself over and over again on the flight. It had been twelve years. There was no reason for it to come out now.

  She had opened her mouth to try to explain and found, as she had every time she had ever tried to explain her friendship with Lila and Georgia, that the words wouldn’t come. ‘It’s not a normal friendship,’ she had managed, before running out of words.

  ‘I get it,’ Brett had replied. ‘You went to boarding school together. You grew up together. That kind of thing has got to bond you for life.’

  Nancy had almost laughed then. So close to the truth, and yet so, so far.

  The crapness of the radio was pleasingly universal. Whether it was a cab from her apartment to the office in Boston, or from the airport to Georgia’s house in Notting Hill, there would always be
some unreasonably cheerful duo talking about things that couldn’t matter less, interspersed with decades-old pop music. Brett ran his hand up her thigh.

  ‘Baby?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  As if she was going to give any kind of honest answer to that question while they were sitting in the back of a car with a complete stranger driving. Even without the driver’s presence, telling Brett how she felt in that moment seemed an unlikely prospect. He was not the type of man who could deal with a real conversation. His speciality was small, fixable problems. Nancy made sure to have a light bulb that needed changing, a low-level work dilemma or a faux friendship crisis about once a fortnight, so that Brett had something to get involved in. Like breadcrumbs, she left a trail for him, something for him to follow so that he felt he was moving towards her with each situation. That was the secret – seeming just vulnerable enough to keep a man interested, while remaining a challenge so that he didn’t have a chance to get bored.

  Brett’s function was as a pleasant distraction, and a cure for her inconvenient desire for the physicality of sex. Masturbation, which she had taken an almost scientific attitude towards, was disappointingly unfulfilling. Something inside her, something which didn’t fit with the rest of her soul, needed the skin and sinew of another person. That was what Brett was. His body was reassuringly thick and he was beautiful enough not to be intimidated by Nancy’s wealth. He had his own friends, and rarely complained about her working late. In short, he was the perfect concubine. She’d planned to let him go after six months, to follow her usual pattern, but then she’d received Georgia’s email.

  She had read it in bed. Brett had gone down on her, something he seemed to genuinely like doing, and then fallen asleep next to her. She’d pulled her phone from under the pillow for a final check and there it was. No subject line. Very few words; a plea to come home.

  Nancy wasn’t sure what was in the email that had convinced her. She wasn’t in the habit of flying halfway across the world on the strength of one email. And Georgia had always been a drama queen. When they were at school, she was forever imagining scenarios involving the people around her; these mostly consisted of classmates’ teenage pregnancies and lesbian romances between teachers.

  But there had been something about the email, about Georgia’s words. She’d deleted it, and then watched her fingers type in the words ‘British Airways’ and book two first-class tickets home.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Nancy replied, conscious of the pause she had left. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I can’t wait to meet your friends. I want to hear everything about you.’

  The truth was, there were no funny stories about her. No stories about getting drunk and shaving off eyebrows or pole-dancing in sleazy clubs. No mistaken one-night stands or drunken phone calls. Every story that she had told Brett, every pseudo embarrassing anecdote was stolen. Over the eighteen months they had been dating she had told him dozens of tales about her life in England, but they were all Georgia’s or Lila’s stories. She had lived, obviously. She’d got drunk, got high, fucked people she shouldn’t have. But none of those things had been mistakes. It had all been thought through. Planned. That was how she worked. This light, easy, silly person that men seemed to like so much was a fiction.

  She had almost shattered the illusion earlier, in the airport. Brett had offered to call an Uber when the car service hadn’t turned up. ‘Do you have Uber in London?’ he had asked. She had missed the joke and snapped at him. Realizing her mistake, she’d immediately pulled it back, or hoped she had, winding her arms around his shoulders and pressing her body into his. He didn’t seem to notice her racing heart against his chest. She didn’t want an Uber. She had booked the sleek town car a week ago because arriving at Georgia’s Notting Hill palace in a dirty Prius wasn’t the sort of impression she was willing to give.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Brett repeated the question, his dark eyes full of concern. The consolation prize for having to come to Georgia and Lila’s rescue would be watching them meet Brett. They were going to be sick when they saw him. It wasn’t just that he was younger. It was the thickness of his arms, the width of his shoulders, the way that his lips were so full and so quick to laughter. He was objectively perfect. In the dark orange street light, Nancy reminded herself to look at him. She couldn’t wait to see Brett, aggressively handsome, a cliché of good looks, standing next to their milky-pale English husbands with weak chins and navy-blue suits.

  Brett had offered to change and, knowing Georgia would disapprove of his T-shirt and jeans, she had told him not to. She wanted the girls to watch his lean forearms and heavy biceps as he passed the salad. She wanted them to go to bed later and lie awake, thinking about what it would be like to wrap their arms around Brett’s broad shoulders or twist their legs around his waist.

  She thought of the sympathetic glances Lila had shot her during her wedding to Roo, and the painful blind dates Georgia had sent her on before she’d moved to America. Her lips formed a slow smile.

  ‘I’m fine. I promise. It’s strange to be back, that’s all.’

  ‘Are you excited to see your girlfriends?’

  ‘So excited,’ she lied. ‘And a bit nervous. Do I look OK?’

  Brett unclipped his seat belt so he could twist around and kiss Nancy full on her mouth. This was the kind of silly, dramatic gesture that she usually couldn’t abide.

  ‘You look amazing,’ he murmured. ‘I can’t wait to tell them our news.’

  Nancy looked down, her dark bob swinging around her face.

  ‘Me neither,’ she replied, her eyes fixed on the enormous stone which glittered from the ring finger of her left hand.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Brett, as he dragged Nancy’s bag up the white steps of Georgia and Charlie’s house. It was even bigger than Nancy had realized from the photos. ‘Do they have an apartment in the building?’ he asked.

  Nancy pointed to the basement flat. ‘That’s an apartment. The rest of it is theirs.’

  ‘Fuck! And I thought your place was big.’

  Faking laughter, Nancy pressed the doorbell. She heard the click of heels on what would inevitably be a perfectly polished floor and pulled her lips into a smile. Nancy had presented to board members, secured billion-dollar deals – how was it possible that she was this nervous to see her friends from school?

  Even as the thought formed, she knew the answer.

  The huge duck-egg blue front door swung open and Georgia stood, framed by the hall, a wide smile on her face.

  Georgia had hardly changed since they’d last seen each other. How long had it been? Eighteen months? Two years maybe. She’d gained weight, there was no questioning that. At least ten pounds. But her eyes were huge and green, and her heart-shaped face was still unquestionably pretty. She looked as if she should be presenting breakfast television.

  ‘Nance!’ Georgia cried. ‘Come in!’

  She stepped over the threshold, taking it all in. The Diptyque candles burning on the hall table. Polished marble floor. Double-height ceilings, the scent of flowers and cooking. It was like something from a magazine. Aware of a bitter feeling creeping from the back of her throat, she noticed Georgia looking at Brett, taking in his perfect body, perfect stubble, perfect face.

  ‘Brett, this is Georgia,’ Nancy performed the introductions. ‘Georgia, this is Brett.’

  ‘It’s lovely to meet you,’ breathed Georgia, leaning in to kiss him on either cheek. Was Nancy imagining it, or was Georgia blushing?

  ‘You can come in and say a quick hi before you settle in,’ Georgia said, ‘or freshen up and then come down?’ From the way that she was standing in front of the door to the kitchen, pointing up the stairs, Georgia was making it painfully obvious which she’d rather they did.

  ‘Let’s freshen up,’ said Brett, always the gentleman.

  ‘It’s great of Georgia and Charlie to let us stay,’ said Brett, dragging Nancy’s suitcase up the stairs. The wheels were making
grooves on the thick carpet, which pleased her. Not enough to actually damage it, but enough that Georgia would panic. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘She’s a babe like that.’

  Brett whistled as he opened the door to the guest room. One of the guest rooms. No doubt this would be the best one. Georgia wasn’t so much a social climber as a social mountaineer. She wasn’t going to miss the chance to show off. Nancy had to admit it was beautiful. High sash windows were covered with silk curtains. The walls were a delicate, chalky pink, so pale it was almost white. Under her feet there were floorboards, ancient ones. They had been painted white, and in the middle of the room was a luxurious rug. The bed was enormous, drowning in throw pillows and spread with a velvet cover. The headboard must have been six-foot tall, mauve-grey linen and punctured by buttons. Everything was very big or very soft and very, very expensive. This was Georgia all over: tasteful excess. She’d come a long way since being Georgia Green, scholarship girl.

  ‘This is bigger than my entire apartment,’ said Brett, dropping his duffle bag on the floor and looking up at the double-height ceiling.

  ‘Mmm,’ Nancy muttered, wondering whether Georgia and Charlie’s room was as big as this, or whether she had lived up to her lower-class convention and reserved the most impressive room for guests.

  ‘Do you want to unpack?’ she asked Brett, watching the awe on his face. In spite of herself, she found it endearing. He turned, heading into the bathroom with his little plastic bag of liquids from the plane.

  He wasn’t that much younger than her. Six years. But by the time she had turned twenty-six she had seen things, done things. All Brett had done was road trips to the beach and a sheltered, cushy liberal arts degree where his ‘professors’ would give their students time off if they needed a ‘mental health day’. Brett thought he was worldly because he had escaped Idaho. He came from a world where just living in Boston made him somebody,

  It didn’t, obviously. But his enthusiasm, his confidence, his conviction in everything he did – Nancy found that a pretty heady combination. He was hard to resist.