Believing the Lie

Freddie looked round the car park. He spied the heavy wheelie bin. He said to Manette, “Oh, I think we can give them a reason to come.”

He trotted over to the wheelie bin and put his shoulder to it. She saw what he intended and joined him in the effort. They began to roll the bin towards the shops, picking up speed on a slope of the car park. As they approached the front of Shots! Freddie murmured, “Give it your best now, darling. And hope he set the burglar alarm.”

He had done. So they discovered when the wheelie bin crashed through the front door of the photo shop and the alarm began to howl.

Freddie winked at Manette and rested his hands on his thighs to catch his breath. “Voila,” he said.

“Bob’s your uncle,” she replied.

MORECAMBE BAY CUMBRIA

Alatea was motionless, a statue more than two miles from where she’d leapt off the seawall and into the empty channel of the River Kent. When she’d set off from Arnside, she’d seen the fog but at that point she could still make out in the distance the peninsula that was Holme Island, and she knew that round the tip of it lay Grange-over-Sands and escape.

She’d thought to put on her hiking boots, deciding she had just time for that and an anorak as Nicky and the red-haired woman had their conversation out on the driveway. She’d grabbed her bag, faded out of the house via the drawing room doors, and made for the seawall. She’d swung herself over it and out onto the sands, where she’d begun to run as best she could.

The channel and the bay it fed into both were virtually waterless. The River Kent was a mere leapable creek at that point. The water of the bay was nonexistent. She had sufficient time to make the crossing, she reckoned, as long as she took care. She knew how to do that. She had a walking stick to help her and even if she hit a patch of the quicksand for which the bay and its surrounds were notorious, she knew what to do should she become caught in it.

What she hadn’t counted on was the fog. While she’d seen it far to the northwest of Arnside, and while she knew the likelihood of its advancing towards shore, what she hadn’t understood was how quickly it was going to roll in. And roll it did, like a diaphanous barrel of immense proportions that silently rumbled forward, inexorably, swallowing everything in its path. When it reached her, Alatea knew in an instant that this was more a pestilential miasma than was it mere fog because she understood that this substance brought with it a deadly danger. What began as a vapour — nothing more than a hoary veil that was cold and damp but still not impossible to navigate — within moments became a grey drapery so thick that it felt to Alatea as though her eyes were playing tricks upon her for the simple reason that she could not see and this seemed impossible because it was daylight, but other than the fact that the sun was out somewhere rendering visible the colours of her boots, her anorak, and the fog itself, she could see nothing at all. There was no depth to her vision. No width. No height. There was only fog.

She’d had no choice but to turn back for Arnside, which was closer than Grange-over-Sands. But in less than five minutes she’d stopped moving forward because she no longer knew if it was forward that she was moving.

There were sounds that should have helped her negotiate the route back to her home, but she couldn’t tell where they were coming from. The first she heard was the train crossing the railway viaduct, which spanned the Kent Channel from Arnside and ultimately carried passengers onward to Grange-over-Sands. But she couldn’t make out whether the train was going to or coming from Grange-over-Sands, and further, she couldn’t even tell in what direction the railway track lay. According to her reckoning, it should have been to her left if she was on the route back to Arnside, but it sounded as if it was coming from behind her, which would mean she was heading out to sea.

She turned to correct her course, then, and began to walk again. She hit a puddle, sank up to her calf, and quickly pulled back. Someone shouted in the distance somewhere. She couldn’t tell where the shout was coming from, but it sounded close, and this was good. She turned towards it and resumed her progress.

A tractor roared. At least it sounded like a tractor. But it was directly behind her — or so it seemed — so that would be the best route to shore. She turned towards it. She called out — “Hello? Hello? I’m here. Over here,” but she heard nothing in reply, only the tractor’s engine, and it seemed to groan and strain, as if the machine was pulling an inconceivably heavy load.

And then a horn honked. Yes, she thought, that way was the road. Only, the road seemed to be where the sea was supposed to be and if she went in that direction, she’d be lost, surely. She would wander among the little hillocks of sand, through the puddles, and ultimately she’d stumble into a scour, where the waters of the bay did exactly that: scoured out the sand to form a trough upon which sand resettled in a new form that was too much liquid to bear the weight of anything other than the smallest bird. And then she would sink.

She stopped again. She turned. She listened. She called out. In reply came the cry of a gull. A moment later the air seemed to part for an instant with the sound of a gunshot or the backfire from a car. Then silence, utter and complete.

That was the moment Alatea knew there was no escape. That there never had been any real escape. From this instant out in the far east part of Morecambe Bay there might be some form of either flight or rescue. But from her life and the lies she’d constructed so that she might dwell safely within it, there was not. It was time she faced up to that, she decided. For every occasion of her life had led her to a moment of revelation she’d foolishly thought she could avoid forever. But there simply was no avoiding it any longer. That was the only truth that remained.

All right. So be it. She would take what was coming to her because she surely deserved it. She opened her bag. It was only when she found her purse, her chequebook, her makeup case, and not her mobile phone inside that she saw in her mind’s eye where she had left the device, sitting on the kitchen worktop plugged into a socket, recharging itself. She stared mutely into her bag then and understood that speaking the truth to Nicholas was not the final challenge remaining for her.

Hers would be to take the leap into accepting the icy embrace of what was inevitable. How could she have thought it would ever have been otherwise? she wondered. For hadn’t each step she’d taken since she’d run away from her family brought her to this single spot on earth in this one perilous moment of time?

There had never really been an escape — only a postponement — and she finally understood this. While science and surgery had provided her a way to shed the terrible carapace that had been her prison, rendering her the strangest of strangers in a very strange land, there was no taking flight from what had gone into her making and this was the stuff of her memories, which could not be shed no matter how she tried.

The worst part, she thought, had been the boxing lessons that followed the declaration that her brothers couldn’t be expected to fight the battles of Santiago Vasquez y del Torres forever. It was time Santiago learned to defend himself against bullies, his father insisted. But the fear was bright like a silver coin in his eyes as he spoke, and he frowned with more than concern and displeasure when Santiago didn’t want horseplay with his brothers, when Santiago wasn’t interested in building fortresses or playing soldiers, in wrestling, in trying to direct his pee as far as Carlos could. And the fear was bright in his mother’s eyes when she came upon her Santiago playing dressing-up, cradling a doll, or planning a tea party with cousin Elena Maria.

The faces of Santiago’s parents said the same thing without speaking: What have we borne into this world? His father’s worry was an obvious one for a man of his culture, his age, his religion, and his upbringing. He worried he had foisted upon the world another depraved homosexual. His mother’s worry was more subtle and more in keeping with her nurturing disposition in general. How would her Santiago cope in a world ill equipped to understand him?

Escape at the time meant Elena Maria. To her Santiago had told it all. She’d heard his explanation of being a soul inside a body that he did not even recognise as his own. He looked out of this body, he told her, and looked down upon it and saw it was male and knew it as male, but it did not function as the body of a male and he did not wish it to function so. He couldn’t even stand to touch it, he