The Past and Other Lies Read Online Free

students’ centre, the computer labs, various shops and cafes, and Northgate Bar, in which 99p pints of Auld Augie could still be purchased.
    The old hospital had rested congenially amid ten acres of graceful woodland. Much of this woodland had now made way for a small cityscape of concrete and steel blocks, a crowd of prefabricated cabins, various sports fields, a gym and six car parks. It was into a secluded spot in the most remote and least-used car park that Charlotte, the following morning, slid her ten-year-old Fiesta. She had deliberately chosen this car park, the one behind the library, rather than her usual spot behind the Moffat Building. It was only the second week of term after the Christmas break and with summer exams so far off it seemed reasonable to assume that the library would be relatively deserted, particularly at eight thirty on a frozen Wednesday morning towards the end of January.
    She had fled the office, the department, and indeed the entire university, soon after the phone call from Dr Lempriere, and had taken refuge in the remains of a bottle of Tesco’s home-brand shiraz and a decision not to answer the phone to anyone.
    The phone had not rung.
    But today was a new working day and there were tutorials to get through, students to face and colleagues to avoid. Now all she had to do was get out of her car, cross the car park and enter the Moffat Building via the modern languages lab in the basement. She wasn’t hiding; she was keeping a low profile.
    She didn’t move, her fingers still locked around the now motionless steering wheel. Before her eyes popped the image of Jennifer perched on the edge of that cream leather sofa telling Kim (Dr Kim, who was a doctor of philosophy, mind you, and knew as much about medicine as your average Cultural Studies undergrad), telling Kim, telling the studio audience, telling the whole daytime television world, their private business.
    If Jennifer had suddenly decided to relate her little story at some family get-together that would have been awful enough. (What family get-together Charlotte couldn’t imagine—the Denzels hadn’t managed a Christmas in the same city for ten years.) But to do it on television on a Tuesday lunchtime, between an advert for incontinence pads and a segment on kleptomania in former child-star actors, was unforgivable. And now it seemed the entire Cultural Studies department had guffawed through it during their sausage rolls and pot noodles.
    Footsteps crunched in the snow behind the Fiesta and Charlotte pulled her head lower into the collar of her coat. The footsteps passed by, and despite it being early on a frozen Wednesday morning in the unfashionable end of an out-of-the-way car park, she recognised the balding head, battered briefcase and duffle coat of Professor Tom Pitney, head of the department.
    She sank down a little lower in her seat.
    What was Tom doing at the library? And at eight thirty in the morning? No one went to the library—at least, none of the faculty did, unless it was to read the free newspapers. It was Tom Pitney who would be renewing or terminating her contract in September. He would have seen yesterday’s program of course, and now he had come in early in order to work out who to reassign her classes to.
    She laid her head on the steering wheel and closed her eyes.
    ‘Hey!’ The tap on the driver’s-side window almost sent her head through the car roof.
    ‘Jesus Christ!’
    She wiped a gloved hand across the steamed-up window and made out Dr Lempriere standing beside the car with a bright smile as though the below-freezing car park on a Wednesday morning was a perfectly normal place to be—and perhaps it was if you were Canadian.
    Dr Lempriere was Dr Ashley Lempriere of UCO, Toronto, and she had joined the Cultural Studies department on a twelve-month lecturing exchange to teach the honours class.
    The same class Tom Pitney had promised Charlotte.
    She had swept into the faculty in the middle of a