Free The Past and Other Lies by Maggie Joel

was standing here looking for her. Lucky Jennifer. Lucky, popular, pretty Jennifer.
    The door to the lounge was ajar and Dad was watching Capital Tonight .
    ‘ ...a sheep dip in Tower Hamlets ,’ Naomi Findlay, longtime presenter of the program, announced obscurely in her perfectly enunciated Home Counties voice. The incongruity of such words taken out of context seemed to give them portent, like words spoken by a prophet. A sheep dip in Tower Hamlets .
    Charlotte took a deep breath, a hard lump filling her stomach. It had been there most of the afternoon, but now it began to glow hot and red, and it travelled up her spine and flushed her cheeks so that they burned. The pounding that had been beating away behind her eyeballs all evening quickened then suddenly vanished.
    ‘I’m sorry, Darren.’ Her mouth assumed the shape of a sympathetic smile. ‘Jen’s out with Adrian Cresswell.’
    The words slid from her mouth as smoothly as the truth might have done. Adrian Cresswell. He and Jennifer had briefly been an item in third year, everyone knew that. The lie was so believable it could almost have been the truth.
    Darren’s lips parted slightly, his eyes widened. He swallowed, the way you did when you were in pain.
    ‘She’s been out with him a lot this week,’ Charlotte continued. ‘I expect she told you she was out with Nikki and Julie?’
    Darren swallowed but said nothing.
    ‘I told her to tell you, I told her it wasn’t fair on you, particularly now everyone at school knows about it...’
    That was it, of course. That was the killer punch: everyone at school knows about it . Yes, she knew how that felt.
    She thought about saying ‘I’m so sorry’ again, but that would have been overdoing it so she just smiled awkwardly, the way a sister might have smiled in such a situation.
    Darren’s eyes glassed over and it seemed as though he was going to demand to know more but instead he turned abruptly and walked, almost ran really, down the driveway and into the light cast by the streetlamp. Then he was gone and Charlotte closed the front door after him and went up the stairs to her room.
    ‘Who was it?’ Mum called from the lounge.
    ‘No one. Double-glazing salesman,’ she replied, then she closed the bedroom door and there on the floor was Jennifer’s pink jumper with red lipstick all over its front just as though someone had deliberately drawn on it.
    Jennifer had come home eventually, giggling and tripping over the loose carpet on the landing and making the bedroom stink of cheap cider—it was a Friday night near the end of term after all. But by the following night Darren had been seen down at the canal with Roberta Peabody and Jennifer had sobbed noisily long into the night while Charlotte had lain hard and cold in bed and stared at the shadows on the wall.

    In the unheated meeting room that was currently home to the Waverley University Academic Dress Sub-Committee, the clock inched forward to nine fifty-one and Charlotte was preparing to speak: We could always take a vote on it . These were the words she would say. Not the most scintillating words ever spoken, it was true, and as suggestions went it was hardly pithy, but it was at least constructive. She would say it.
    Nine fifty-three.
    A second scene popped into her head. Herself and Nick, who was now Jennifer’s ex, though at the time he was her fiancé, seated in a small cafe just off the Embankment. Another scene and another lie twenty years after the first scene, the first lie. But connected, she suddenly realised, because she’d still felt guilty about Darren McKenzie. Had continued to feel guilty right up until Jennifer’s wedding.
    Nine fifty-five.
    At least as far as lies went this one had passed unnoticed and that was important, more important than the fact that her sister had been having an affair with a work colleague a month before her wedding. But the lie had been told and the wedding had gone ahead.
    Still, Jennifer and Nick were