The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

‘The oral storytelling tradition,’ one of the girls said in a mock deep voice, and they all screamed with laughter. Simon guessed they were aping one of their teachers.

‘Shut up, poo-brain! If I lose my exeat privs thanks to you, it’ll be pure tragedy.’

‘No way are we getting curfed for helping a policeman.’

‘Shut up and let me tell him. He hasn’t got time to waste listening to you two infants. We don’t know for sure…’

‘We so do. I heard Miss Westaway and Mrs Dean talking about it.’

‘It might all be scurlyest rumours.’

‘You mean scurrilous. Scurlyest isn’t a word. I apologise on behalf of my intoxicated housemate,’ said the girl nearest to Simon. ‘It’s so not a rumour-it’s the scandalous truth. Scary Mary had a boyfriend who dumped her, right, and she was so miz she tried to kill herself. Hanged herself in Garstead Cottage.’

‘And he was there too, the boyfriend,’ one of the other girls chipped in.

‘Oh, yeah, I forgot that bit. Yeah, she made him go round for the whole closure thing.’ The girl Simon thought was called Flavia-unless he’d got mixed up, and she was Tasha-drew invisible quote marks in the air. ‘And when he got there, she was standing on the dining table, with a rope round her neck, attached to the light or something…’

‘A chandelier! It was a chandelier!’

‘Yeah, right. In a cottage?’

‘I heard it was a chandelier.’

‘Whatever. So, like, he called an ambulance and she was rushed to hospital, but on the way there in the ambulance, she died-like, majorly died. And she had no heartbeat or oxygen going to her brain for three whole minutes…’

‘It was ten minutes…’

‘No one comes back to life after ten minutes, babes. I’ve seen Scary Mary-she’s odd, but she’s not a veg. What was I saying? Oh, yeah: the ambulance people brought her back from, like, beyond death, and she was supposed to be brain damaged, but she wasn’t. She was, like, totally fine. Except she wasn’t, because that was when she turned into Scary Mary. She changed her name.’

‘Stop,’ said Simon. ‘What do you mean? Changed it to what?’

‘Mary Trelease.’

‘Scary Martha would have sounded rubbish-it doesn’t rhyme.’

‘Martha?’ If the girls’ confidence and state of undress hadn’t made him feel so uncomfortable, he’d have asked more forcefully.

‘Martha Wyers-that’s what she used to be called. But after she died and came back to life, she wouldn’t let anyone call her that any more, because, like, Martha Wyers had died?’

‘Gross! This story’s a pure freak-out, every time,’ one of the girls said, wrapping her arms round herself.

‘She lashed anyone who called her Martha. Even her mum and dad had to start calling her Mary.’

‘Lashed?’ Simon interrupted. He had to ask.

‘What? Oh, it’s, like, an expression?’

‘Translation for Villy outsider: she got really angry with anyone who called her Martha.’

‘And she lost weight when she turned into Mary. She was a pure tubber before.’

‘She was pining, wasn’t she, for her one true love?’

Simon couldn’t think clearly with the girls chattering at him. ‘Do you know why she chose the name Mary Trelease?’

They looked at one another, silent for the first time. ‘No,’ said one shirtily after a few seconds, annoyed to have been caught out. ‘What does that matter? A name’s just a name, isn’t it?’

‘Yes it is, Flavia Edna Seawright.’ More giggles erupted.

‘Her name’s not the only thing she changed after her resurrection, I know that,’ said Flavia, in an attempt to divert attention.

‘Oh, yeah-how weird is this?’

‘She used to be a writer-she had a book published.’

‘Yeah, there’s a copy in our house library.’

‘She must have been in Heathcote, then.’

‘No, Margerison.’

Simon understood the signs he’d seen. Boarding houses.

‘What house she was in is so, like, trivial? She was a writer, but after she hanged herself and it didn’t work, she never wrote another word-she took up painting instead. Not me personally, but loads of Villy girls have seen her wandering around at night, smoking, covered in paint…’

‘Didn’t Damaris Clay-Hoffman stop her and ask her if she had a spare ciggy?’

‘Damaris Clay-Hoffman’s such a rank liar!’

‘Where’s her cottage?’ asked Simon. ‘Don’t come with me, just tell me where,’ he said to the girls. He wanted to approach quietly, not with a screeching chorus around him.

As Flavia Edna Seawright pointed to her left, a loud noise, like a small explosion, burst out of the night. ‘Oh, my God!’ she said, grabbing Simon’s arm. ‘I’m not even joking any more, man. That sounded like a gun.’

27

Wednesday 5 March 2008

‘A stupid mistake,’ says Mary. ‘You said “Go to your parents’ house”. You meant Cecily’s house, didn’t you? I could see from your face that you knew. You’re a bad liar.’

Pain burns all the way through me. There’s a bullet inside me, metal in my body. I saw it coming towards me, too fast for me to move. I’m lying on the floor. I reach out for Aidan’s hand, but he’s too far away.

‘You’re a… good liar,’ I manage to say. ‘You’re Martha.’

‘No. Martha died. Her heart stopped. Her mind stopped. You can’t die and be the same person afterwards. I’m one of the few people alive who knows that’s not possible.’

‘Abberton… the names…’ I try to raise my head, to look down at my body, but it hurts too much. I can’t move and think at the same time, and I have to think.

‘What about them? What about the names?’

‘Aidan didn’t destroy your… paintings. You did it to him. You bought…’ I can’t go on.

She looks down at me. I feel light; not a person any more but a weightless flow of pain. My mind starts to hum; it would be easy to fall into that comforting sound, allow it to roll me away. ‘He did it,’ Mary insists. ‘He took all my pictures and he cut them to pieces.’

‘No.’ I gasp for air. ‘The names… boarding houses…’

‘No!’ Mary raises her voice. ‘I’d never do that. He did it. He did it to me.’

‘You bought his pictures using those names.’ Each breath is a struggle, but without the struggle there would be nothing, no energy to stay alive. ‘You… made him come here…’ My mind fills with words that would take too much effort to say. He didn’t want to see you again, but you bribed him: fifty grand for a commission. ‘He stopped painting because of what you did.’

Scenes from the story Mary told me drift back into my mind. One half true, the other half lies. The cottage door left open, as she said. Aidan walking in, looking for her. Finding her standing on the dining table with a rope round her neck, his ruined paintings on the floor in front of her. Did she tell him what she’d done and then jump? Two shocks for him, locked together in one moment for devastating impact. That’s why he couldn’t move at first, why he didn’t rush to save her life. He was traumatised, paralysed.

‘My gardens.’ Every word wrings sweat from me. ‘Not Aidan. You did it. One last summer, to punish me for… Saul’s gallery. I frightened you. You hate not… being in control.’ The second after Charlie Zailer spoke to you on Monday and told you I was Aidan’s girlfriend. You’d given me Abberton as a gift, without knowing: another loss of control. Another punishment.