The Past and Other Lies by Maggie Joel

of his room must have shrunk by some inches and the fumes sent Grandma Lake to bed with a migraine. Jennifer had selected a boy at school—Darren McKenzie—to go out with and spent all her free time at his house.
    Charlotte stayed late after school and no one ever asked why. She read books in the library that weren’t on the curriculum ( War and Peace, Animal Farm, Madame Bovary) , she wandered aimlessly around the shopping precinct near school, avoiding the gangs of fifth-formers who gathered near the fountain and threw each other’s school bags in the water. And she spent at least three evenings a week and most of the weekend over at Zoe Findlay’s house.
    Nearly a year after Grandma Lake had moved in, Aunt Caroline still hadn’t been down to visit.
    Mum alone had carried on as though nothing had happened, vacuuming around Grandma Lake as though she were a fixture that came with the house, reducing her array of culinary dishes down to about five that all included potato, carrots and peas as though potato, carrots and peas were what she had secretly yearned to cook all her life.
    Dad said very little on the subject of Grandma Lake but he didn’t have to. On a chilly March morning, some five months after Grandma Lake’s arrival, he had turfed the Austin out of the garage and onto the driveway and in a day-long flurry of shifting and rearranging and throwing out and rewiring and hammering had turned the garage into a den. Here he had moved the second-best armchair, the desk that had once been in the study, a bookcase, a transistor radio, his case of dusty old 45s (the Everly Brothers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Del Shannon, Dion and the Belmonts, Adam Faith), the old black-and-white portable television set that still occasionally worked and, finally, himself.
    A sort of calm had descended.

    Charlotte sat up, listening. The door to Grandma Lake’s room was closed. Downstairs the theme tune to Crossroads had just ended and in the bathroom Jennifer coughed and sobbed noisily into the toilet bowl. And tomorrow was the first day of the new school year. Not just any school year: her first day in the lower sixth form, Jennifer’s first in the upper sixth.
    Tomorrow.
    It was curious, mind-numbing even, to think of a tomorrow. To think of the rest of this evening. The next five minutes.
    She wouldn’t go in to school. She would spend the day curled up in bed even if it meant Mum telephoning the doctor’s surgery. Perhaps she would never go in. Perhaps she would never get up.
    Jennifer had stopped vomiting and was breathing loudly with jerky sobbing breaths as though she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.
    ‘ ...an unlikely place to find a soup tureen .’
    Crossroads had ended and in its place the carefully modulated voice of Derek Longstaff, the new Capital Tonight presenter, floated up the stairs from the lounge. Derek Longstaff had started the week before, replacing the previous presenter, much to Grandma Lake’s disgust. Each time he came on she scowled and said, ‘He’s not a patch on that Naomi girl.’
    Charlotte closed her eyes.
    From the bathroom the sound of the toilet flushing momentarily muffled the sobbing.
    She opened her eyes. Soon Jennifer would emerge from the bathroom—and then what? Did she want to be found crouching here in the doorway? What was the alternative? She couldn’t go downstairs and sit with everyone watching television. She didn’t want to listen to Grandma Lake complaining about Derek Longstaff.
    Funny that Grandma Lake was always Grandma Lake and never Grandma. It wasn’t as though Grandma Lake had to compete for a place with a plethora of other grandmas—she was it: the sole grandparent. Her real name was Bertha, which made you think of ocean liners and little cabins with narrow bunks—but no one ever called her that either.
    Grandma Lake’s bedroom door was closed. You could almost imagine that behind the door it was still a study, with Dad’s old desk in there