'You mean that everything that you
have ever written to me is untrue?'
'Not everything.'
'Like what? What’s true?
'Well,' Sue took a deep breath, her eyes gliding from one
corner to the other, 'I’ve got a cat called Tiddles.'
'Really? That’s it,' said Martha. 'Penpals for fifty-six
years, goodness knows how many letters back and forth - hundreds, maybe over a
thousand - and the only grain of truth in anything you have ever told me is
that you have a cat called Tiddles! I’m speechless.'
Clearly,
she wasn’t speechless, in fact she had a lot
to say, all sorts of angry words spinning through her mind chaotically. Years
of shared secrets, since those first letters at the age of eight, when they got
in touch through a childhood magazine. She had three or four penpals then -
Lucy in Ireland, Fiona in Scotland, Sandra in Cornwall and Sue in Wales. Sue
was the only one that stuck. They had continued writing in their teens, where
the letters had gotten more personal, no more the childhood letters about
ponies and seashells, but more important missives about potential boyfriends,
unrequited emotions and broken hearts.
'I poured my heart out to you,' was what she finally
settled on saying.
'Yes, I know.' Sue looked into her teacup. At the bottom were leaves of loose tea that
had escaped the strainer. Proper tea in a proper tea room, waitresses in black
dresses with white aprons. A first ever meeting between them, face-to-face.
After fifty-six years. 'I’m sorry.'
'Why?'
'I thought we would never meet so it wouldn’t matter.'
'Wouldn’t matter!' Now Martha was speechless. All those
stories that Sue had told her, boyfriends, break-ups, ill parents, dying
parents, sibling rivalry, pregnancies and miscarriages, births and parenting.
Surely not all lies? It couldn’t be, could it?
'So you haven’t got a husband called Graham?'
Sue
shook her head, big tears in her eyes like about-to-burst bubbles.
'And you don’t have a daughter called Naomi and a son named
Steven?'
The
tears fell, blotchy and blurry. 'No,
never married. I’m a spinster. Such an ugly word to describe a woman.'
Too
right, thought Martha, an ugly word for an ugly woman with an ugly soul. But
she didn’t say it out loud, much as she wanted
to.
'You lied, right from the beginning?'
'No, not right from the beginning. The childhood letters
were true, well mostly. Apart from the holidays. Oh, and my sister didn’t get
knocked down and killed by a train.'
'You lied about that? About your sister being killed? That
is so disgusting. Did your sister ever know what you wrote in your made up
world about her? Did she ever find out?'
'No.' Sue’s voice was tiny as a sparrow. 'I don’t actually
have a sister.'
'What? So it’s all made up? Even having a sister? You amaze
me. No, you don’t, you sicken me.'
'Yes, I’m a terrible person.'
A
black-and-white dressed waitress came across to them with a stern face. 'I am sorry ladies, but my manager says that you need to
keep your voices down,' at this point she looked at Martha who was definitely
the louder of the two, 'or he will ask you to leave. You are agitating the
other customers.'
'Yes, sorry, sorry, yes.' Martha and Sue said between them.
They waited until the waitress had waddled away before continuing. The
intrusion had made Martha realise just how loud her outpourings had been, and
did actually calm her down. She spoke
more quietly. 'What made you lie for all
these years?'
Sue
was quiet for a while, looking down at her hands which she cradled in her lap
under the table, where only she could see. 'I think mostly I was jealous of you. You did such
interesting signs all the time, saw so many interesting things, had interesting
friends and went to interesting places.' She stopped abruptly; perhaps realising how she was using the same
word over and over again, 'And by comparison my life seemed so……' she stretched
for a word but fell back down, 'uninteresting.'
'You must have done interesting things too,' Martha said,
thinking on how she had never thought of the life that she had written in
return was all that special really - childhood, courting, marriage, parenthood,
grand-parenthood. Nothing seemed that special really. Seeing Sue shrinking into
a ball more and more before her eyes, she decided to change tack. 'Why did you
agree to meet with me then, after five decades? You must have known the truth
would come out.'
'I did try to put you off.'
'You certainly did!' And for the first time, Martha felt a
smile on her own face, thinking of her letters asking to come and visit. Since
her husband, Tony, had died - she had written -
and left her his pension, and with the state pension kicking in, she
felt the freedom that the money had brought her. 'I don’t want to sit at home
in an empty house, now the children had their own families, their own lives, so
many miles away.' She had written, and then emphasised in a follow up letter
after Sue’s first refusal and weak excuse. Martha’s house was empty. She didn’t
want any regrets. She wanted to spread her wings. It had seemed such a good
idea to visit Sue Harriman, her penpal since childhood, who she had written
countless hundred letters to, to finally speak to the confidant that she had
written her secrets to all these years. Four refusals, excuses, medical appointments,
a chest infection. It hadn’t been until she wrote saying that she had already
purchased the train tickets to Swansea that Sue had finally written and agreed
to meet. That had been a lie, actually: she hadn’t purchased the tickets at
that point, it had been a tactic to force Sue’s hand. It had worked a treat.
And
now she was here.
'Start from the beginning, shall we?'
'Yes, but not here. Shall we go back to my place?' Sue
asked, a pleading look in her eyes.
Sue’s flat wasn’t far: down the road and round the corner. It
was a one bedroom flat above a florist, entered by a set of concrete steps down
a poorly-lit side alley. As Sue opened the door, a stripy cat paddled up to
them and rubbed her flank against the legs of both the women.
'This must be Tiddles? The one truth.' Martha knew she was
being harsh-tongued, but what could anyone expect? This was clearly not the
house that Sue said she lived in - a semi-detached, with a garage and
voluptuous gardens. Whose house had that been? There were certainly no children
here, no husband in evidence. The knitting on the coffee table, the single,
used cup and saucer on the side, showed a single person leading a solitary
life. The cushions on one armchair were flattened with use; the other chair’s cushions
were buoyant and fluffed.
'You live alone?' When Sue nodded, she interrogated
further, 'Always lived alone? No husband? Children? No Sammy who was good at
Maths and worked in a bank, or Louise who went to Durham University?'
Sue
shook her head.
'These people don’t exist?'
'They do exist!' Sue interrupted sharply. She was up on her
toes, like a swan about to attack, before slumping down again. 'They are a
family I know. That I clean for.'
'You’re a cleaner? I
thought you worked for the Government. I thought you said you were a senior
manager for the D.V.L.A. That was a lie too?'
Things started to fit together in Martha’s mind. 'The photographs that
you attached to your letters - of the boy and the girl growing up, and of the
man. Who are they?'
'They are the Benson family. I have cleaned for them for
years, three times a week. That’s all I am, a cleaner. I never worked for any
Government office. They had two
children, Sammy and Louise. It wasn’t lies really. Everything I wrote about them
was true.'
'Well, not really. You were constantly on about them being
yours.'
'That bit wasn’t true, obviously, but the facts of them
were.'
'How did you get the photographs. Some of them were holiday photos, in Greece
and Spain and Florida and places.'
Sue
looked likely to cry again. 'I
stole them. Mostly when I cleaned, the house was empty. It was Mr Benson who
worked for the D.V.L.A. So I took them.
Sometimes I made copies and put them back.'
Martha
thought of how sometimes the photographs were of poor quality. That would
explain it, photographs of photographs. She had put it down to Sue having a
low-quality camera. 'Did you have no
family of your own? Nothing of this was true.' She knew the answer, simply by
looking round this dusky flat, that stank of loneliness. The pictures on the wall were of landscapes.
There were no family portraits, no children in caps and gowns, or dressed in
school uniform.
'I’ll put the kettle on,' Sue said, turning her back and
walking away.
It
all had started off with the lie about her parents. She didn’t have two loving parents, Bert and Edie, but a mother who
had died giving birth to her and a father who resented her all his life for
taking the love of his life away. She
had brought herself up mostly, with the help of an Aunty Florrie, she came and
did the child-care until she was eight. After a big argument where Florrie had
screamed at her father - whose real name, apparently, was Joseph - to man up
and start taking responsibility for his daughter, and to stop moping around,
Aunty Florrie never came back and Sue had to take charge of the house.
'You said your mother died of a stroke when you were
thirteen. That was made up?'
'Not entirely. You see, my father,' - she said the word
bitterly as if it were an honorary title bestowed but undeserved - 'had a
few fancy women after Aunty Florrie
left. One was called Maggie and she was the one that died of a stroke.'
'On your kitchen floor?'
'Yes, that bit was true.'
'It just wasn’t your mother?'
'No. But I liked her. She was kind to me. Unlike the other
two: Ellen and Alice. They really were
not kind to me. Alice used to hit me and my father would watch and laugh.'
It
was funny how, now the truth (if it was indeed the truth) was out there, it had
seemed more interesting than the actual subjects she had written about -
playing on the beach, school friends, secret boyfriends and kissing behind the
bike sheds. In fact, Martha was starting to feel a little bit sorry for her. 'Why didn’t you write about these things? I could have
helped.'
'You wrote your first letter to me, introducing yourself.
You had a happy family, brothers and sisters. Your words were full of smiles.
Laughter. I had to write back something positive, so I could be like you,
otherwise you might not reply. I didn’t want you to think I was needy. I was
frightened that you wouldn't write back.'
'Of course I would have written back!' But even as she said
it, Martha knew that she probably wouldn’t have, her childhood self not wanting
to associate with anything macabre.
'Then you started having boyfriends, so I wrote about
boyfriends.'
'Was any of that true?'
'Well, the ones I had feelings for that didn’t love me
back, they were true. There was a Luke that I wrote about, and a Peter. I had a big crush on Peter!' Sue almost
smiled then, triggered by the memory of him. 'But not the ones that I
supposedly dated. You seemed to be so successful at the whole dating game.'
Martha
laughed, 'Well, I suppose I did have some fun
times!' Noting a sadness in Sue’s face, she quickly dropped the hilarity.'
'And then you got married, had children…' Sue’s voice
dropped off, an aircraft suddenly falling away off the radar.
Martha
explored Sue’s face. There was story there. A
sadness. She waited, hoping silence would draw it out.
'There was a man.'
'Go on.'
'He was rough. He attacked me. I became pregnant. I had an
abortion. It wasn’t a proper abortion.
You couldn’t then. It was some woman
with needles and a bottle of whiskey. It
was a mess. After that I couldn’t have children. Didn’t really want a man. The
whole experience put me off….' Sh searched for the word, came up with two. 'Closeness.
Intimacy.'
Martha
had an epiphany. 'This was when I
was writing to you about my Tony and how happy I was? And the preparations for
the wedding?'
'Yes, I sort of retreated into this imaginary world. I had
been lying to you already so I thought I would just keep going. It was an
outlet for me. It was my light in a dark existence. After all, I never thought
we would ever meet. I never thought you would ever find out. That it would
matter.'
'And so you stole another family and invented it as your
own. To match the family I wrote about.'
'Yes. Do you really
mind? Does it really matter that much?'
Martha
thought for a moment. 'Yes,
in fact it really does.' She stood up from the armchair she was sitting in,
placed the teacup on the saucer, put her coat back on. 'I think I will go now.'
'Your train isn’t for another four hours.'
'Look, I really can’t stay here. I feel like you’ve trapped
me in your web of lies and I feel….slimy. I have to get out.'
Sue
was on her feet too, a slight, short woman, under-fed, not-quite-cared-for. 'Please. Stay.'
'No. Really I can’t.'
With
that, she picked up her handbag and walked to the door, almost kicking the cat.
It question-marked its tail as it scampered out of the way of this strange
woman’s angry hooves.
Out
on the street, past the scent of the florist and onto the less pleasant smells
of High Street take-aways and smoked-out cigarettes, Martha felt free. All those lies, year upon year upon year of
falsehoods, an entire life of fiction. She could scarcely believe it. A woman
never married, pretending to step into the norms expected of a woman -
courtship, marriage, family. All of
these things made up to try and make her life sound exciting. She knew that once she was over the surprise
of it, that she might reflect on the poor, misguided woman. If this new story
was indeed fact, then she would possibly feel sorry for her, eventually. At the
moment, though, all she felt was betrayal.
Back
on the train, having had hours to calm down using a can of gin and tonic and a
cream slice to aid her, and with the fields and bushes fading into darkness out
of the window, she began to see her own face reflected in the glass. Fifty-four years of opening envelopes
excitedly, gullibly reading each word,
each sentence, each paragraph, and believing it all to be true. It was a sad truth that these letters were
little points of hope in a sad existence
that she did not want to admit to. A
lifetime of lies. Letter after letter.
Martha
was tired after her long day, and she settled back into her seat, perching her
handbag on her lap. The man across from her had his eyes closed already and was
trying to set himself down into sleep. She might do the same. She took one last
glance at her own face. A warmth embraced her.
She had finally gotten the truth out of her pen pal.
She
must have nodded off and was woken up by the clatter of her handbag on the
floor.
'Oops,' she said at the same time as the man opposite said
it. Sleepiness still hung around his
eyes.
'Sorry. Did I wake you?' Martha said.
'Don’t worry. I didn’t want to go to sleep now anyway. I
won’t sleep tonight if I do.'
Helping
her up pick up the spillage from her bag, he bent down: a tube of lipstick, a
vanity mirror, a photograph.
'Ooh, is this your dog?'
'Yes,' Martha smiled.
'I’ve got a Border Terrier as well. What’s his name? It is
a he, isn’t it?'
'Yes, Arthur.'
'Mine’s a great lad. We call him Dougie. Bought him for the
wife. She loves dogs. More than she loves me, I think sometimes,' and he smiled
at Martha.
'Oh, Arthur is mine. I know what you mean, though. He is
lovely company. Without him, I’d come home to an empty house. There’s just me
and him you see. I never married. My life has just been dogs, and always Border
Terriers.'
'Oh, yes. A lovely breed, so loyal, such great fun, too.
Full of energy.'
Stuffing
her belongings back in her handbag haphazardly, she rested back on her seat.
Not once had Sue asked her whether everything she'd written had been true!
Thank goodness, really, because like Sue, not a single word she had written
about her life had been true either!
Sue, though, had never found out, so who was better at this lying game?
Certainly not Sue Harriman, that was for sure.
She closed her eyes, feeling the warm thrill of victory.
About the author
David Hawkins is a Primary School teacher by pay and a fiction writer by passion. His first writing success was back in a previous millennium when he was runner up in a writing competition in Marxism Today and more recently, in magazines such as People’s Friend and Scribble.
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