The Past and Other Lies Read Online Free Page B

old and depressed. Either Lempriere did have designs on her own ever-decreasing class list and was even now plotting her downfall, or she was just a nosy gossip.
    Charlotte declined an anti-whaling leaflet and reached into her pocket for a tissue. The icy air was making her nose run.
    ‘So you say your sister’s lying...?’ Ashley continued. Charlotte didn’t respond. ‘Okay, I guess she has her reasons, right? Though I can’t imagine what they’d be. And it ain’t none of my business anyways. What is she, in therapy or something?’
    ‘Not that I’m aware of,’ Charlotte replied stiffly.
    She wasn’t at all sure how she felt about this question with its implication that her sister was a crazy person. On the other hand after yesterday’s little drama perhaps she was. Was Jennifer in therapy? Charlotte felt, a little uncomfortably, that that was the kind of question a sister ought to be able to answer.
    ‘Please, take this!’ pleaded a girl in a grubby army-surplus overcoat, thrusting a photocopied sheet into Charlotte’s hand.
    ‘Excuse me,’ Charlotte said, disengaging her arm from Ashley’s and diving into the safety of the library even though she had no books to return and none that she particularly wished to borrow.
    The leaflet, written in urgent forty-point Arial Bold, screamed: TEENAGE SUICIDE IS EVERYONE’S PROBLEM!

CHAPTER THREE
    AUGUST 1981
    T HE MISSING DINING-ROOM chair was there in the bedroom and Jennifer, standing in the doorway, saw at once what had made the loud thump. It was tipped over on its side in the middle of the room where a dining-room chair had no business to be.
    There was a strong smell of nail varnish.
    She experienced a sudden rush of fury because she knew what she could smell was Shocking-Pink-for-Pink-that-Shocks nail polish, recently acquired from the make-up counter at Top Shop and new this season.
    And Charlotte had stolen it.
    She had stolen it and put it on her own nails and , as if that were not, in itself, a heinous enough crime, she had forgotten to put the lid back on the bottle afterwards. Everyone knew nail polish dried up if you didn’t put the lid back on.
    Jennifer kicked the bedroom door wide open in an explosion of anger that evaporated into something else entirely when she saw, before her, legs kicking a foot above the fallen chair.
    Charlotte was wearing her tartan slippers, the ones Aunt Caroline had given her last Christmas. Jennifer had been given a similar pair, also tartan, and of the sort of suffocating blue and green that only a department store could produce and an aunt could purchase. Those slippers now dangled in the air beneath a pair of stone-washed jeans. Pepe jeans, so tight at the ankle you had to lie on your back to pull them on. The tartan-slippered feet seemed to burst out of the narrow legs like duck’s feet: a cartoon Scottish duck’s feet. At Charlotte’s waist, wrapped almost twice around, was the yellow canvas belt, purchased at Wembley market only the month before, and above that was last year’s Madness T-shirt, already shapeless and faded from too many washes, and from which two skinny white arms reached up, clutching wildly.
    Which was when Jennifer saw the tie.
    It was the school tie, Henry Morton Secondary, with its distinctive diagonal grey and red stripes. School uniform colours. Their school. And one end was tied to the light fitting, the other was tied into a loop and the loop, a tiny loop, barely wide enough for a person’s head, was around her neck.
    It was around her neck.
    Above the loop was Charlotte. Charlotte’s head. Twisted to one side, her hands scrambling for a hold, her face the colour of a washed-out February sky, of sticky window putty, of dough made from wholemeal flour. It was not the colour of skin. Her mouth was taut, the lips peeled back and an oddly bluish colour.
    And the worst thing was—
    The worst thing of all.
    Jennifer knew why she was up there.
    Someone screamed. Or perhaps it was more a