The Lies She Tells

Chapter 1

Thursday 7 September

It was a quiet afternoon at St Luke’s Road Community Library. There was hardly a sound, but for the rustle of paper and the gentle snores of Colonel Lonsdale (retired) dozing over his Daily Telegraph . Kay was hiding out in Aisle C, trying to decide what lie to tell her colleague Sondra should she catch her there. Chasing down the Library Rat was one possibility, or lying in wait for the adolescent boy they suspected of defacing books. Or she could be mulling over her reorganisation plans for Fiction – she’d noticed there were a lot of books in Literature that might more usefully be classified as Mystery, Romance, Crime or Horror.

In truth, Kay was simply bored and needed a break. She perched herself on a kick stool and checked her phone, hoping to find a new message from Jeremy, the owner of a pitch-and-putt golf course who she’d recently met on a dating site called serendipity.com. Jeremy was good-looking, sweet as a puppy, and she’d been flirting with him shamelessly – it was the only kind of flirting she knew how to do. Reading back over their exchanges from yesterday, she grimaced at some of the stuff she’d written – smutty innuendos about holes and clubs and shafts mostly. In response to his advice on putting technique, she’d said “So you need to grip it softly and stroke it smoothly, right?” followed by lots of cry-laughing emojis. She’d expected him to continue in the same vein, but he’d sort of got heavy at that point. “I’ve been looking at your pic all day,” he’d said. “You are SO pretty!”

She wondered if it was time to send him her actual picture – the one currently on her profile was that of a non-existent woman. The app had offered her something called “generic 24-year-old female”, which she’d then customised. She’d gone too far, as usual, with things like cheekbones, skin tone and eye size, and now she looked like some ethereal, pan-ethnic superheroine. Most guys had to know it was a joke, especially when they saw her profession listed as librarian, not international model, but clearly not Jeremy.

As she read through their correspondence, the app pinged with a new message from Jeremy: Hey, I can’t stop thinking about you.

Before she could put the mental brakes on her flirtatious fingers, she typed back: I was literally thinking about you at that moment.

Jeremy: Minds in sync. We’re obviously made for each other.

Kay: Or we’re just two people bored at work. I’ve got to get out of this job!

Jeremy: Do you ever think about the future? Where you’d like to be in five years?

Kay: Hopefully not in prison. Tho that might beat still being here in this library.

Jeremy: They have libraries in prisons I think.

Kay: Oh God don’t! Seriously tho, in five years I want to be a photographer or an actor, if I haven’t left it too late. And maybe I’d like to have found a boyfriend.

Jeremy: Might his name start with J?

Kay: Hm let me see. Jack, James, John… What other names start with J?

Jeremy: Haha! Are you this funny in real life?

Kay: Funny in the sense of odd, most definitely!

Jeremy: I’d love to meet you in the flesh one of these days.

Kay: Nice idea. Let’s definitely do that! Hey isn’t the word ‘flesh’ sexy??

Jeremy: When you say it, I bet it is.

Kay did not want to meet up. It wasn’t just the business of the fake photo. Too often meetings IRL were a let-down. Conversations were stilted and the chemistry they’d felt online just wasn’t there. She’d discover the guy had an odd smell or way of licking his lips. It could be anything. Also, for all his undoubted sweetness, she already knew Jeremy wasn’t the one. He was way too needy and serious. Better to keep it a casual online thing. Couldn’t flirting be an end in itself – a fun way of passing the time, a little boost to the ego? Why did it always have to lead somewhere?

Jeremy: You have this way of making ordinary things seem special. Like you do with your photographs. I never thought I’d be moved by a picture of an empty car park, but that one you sent me yesterday put a real lump in my throat.

Kay responded to this with a big heart. She was proud of her empty car park photos, which had drawn an enthusiastic response from her Flickr followers. She wrote: Hey, speaking of photos, what do you think of people who post fake pics on their profile pages?

This elicited a longer silence from Jeremy. She’d been hoping for a quick, breezy who cares? or It’s not the face, it’s the personality, right? Was her sweet boy going to turn all virtuous on her?

A welcome distraction arrived in the shape of Hilda Dunning. The elderly lady came marching up the aisle to Kay and declared that she wished to lodge a complaint about the previous week’s book signing event. The visiting author had, she claimed, refused to give her a free copy of the book she was promoting. “It’s a library innit?” declared Mrs Dunning. “I don’t come in here to buy books, do I? I’d have given it back to her once I read it.”

“You’re absolutely right, Mrs Dunning,” said Kay. “Authors are so greedy wanting money for their books. They’ll only use it to buy more ink and paper, which they’ll use to write more books, and there are more than enough books in the world already, don’t you think? ”

The lady seemed unsure what to make of this. She was nodding in agreement while at the same time fixing her with a narrow, suspicious glare and sidling hastily past her. Once she was gone, Kay went back to her phone, where a new message had appeared from Jeremy:

I can’t understand why someone would want to use a fake photo. It’s so deceitful. Why, did that ever happen to you?

She let out a despondent sigh and tried to compose a response. She’d have to throw herself on his mercy and hope his infatuation wasn’t solely based on that ridiculous profile pic. I have a confession , she started to write.

“What are you doing, Kay?”

She looked up from her phone to see Sondra staring at her from the far end of the aisle.

“I am…” she began, “checking up on something really important actually. All part of my reorganisation plans for Fiction.” Desperately, she scanned the shelves to discover what she was checking up on. “Does Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier really belong in Literature? What about putting it in Crime, or Romance?” she asked.

“That’s a ridiculous idea,” said Sondra. “It’s a classic Gothic novel. It belongs in Literature.”

“Of course,” said Kay, quickly recovering. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. Just because a novel contains a crime does not make it a crime novel. Look at Crime and Punishment , or–or Peter Rabbit. Are they crime novels? Is Pride and Prejudice a romance novel? I think not. Am I right?”

Sondra was giving her that look again, the furrow-browed, tilted-head one that suggested sympathetic concern, as if the library was actually a care home for the mentally troubled and Sondra was her nurse. The theory made quite a lot of sense when you considered the case of Hilda Dunning.

“Are you okay, Kay?”

Whenever she heard this phrase, Kay’s mind continued her name like an echo. Kay, Kay, Kay…

“I’m fine,” she replied. “Absolutely. Absolument . Everything is hunky dory!”

“What were you really doing just now?”

“Nothing.” Then she sighed and gave up the pretence. “I’m just worried I might have blown it with another guy.”

“Lying again, were you?”

“Kind of.”

Sondra’s expression altered to one of weary resignation. “You’ll never learn, will you? I would just come clean with him. Admit what you did and promise to try and do better in future.”

Kay nodded and bit her lip penitently.

“When you can spare some time from your Grand Reorganisation of Fiction, and your boyfriend troubles, there are quite a few returns that need reshelving.”

“Sure. I’ll be there in a mo.”

Sondra returned to the circulation desk, and Kay’s head dropped back to her phone. Her I have a confession… message still hung there in the text box, unsent. Meanwhile, Jeremy must have panicked at her long silence because he’d written:

I’m wondering now if you asked me that because you think that my profile picture might be fake. Just to put your mind at ease, it isn’t, I promise! And to prove it, here’s another picture of me outside my café. The guy on the left is my older brother Dan.

She looked at the photo of Jeremy and confirmed that it was him. Then her gaze shifted to his brother, where it lingered for a much, much longer time. As if acting under their own command, her fingers quickly deleted her previous message and started typing a new one:

Don’t worry sweetie, I never doubted you for an instant. Hey, you never mentioned you had a brother. What’s he like?

This was followed by more silence, and Kay was about to give up and head over to the desk to deal with the returns, when this came through:

Glad you asked. Dan is the greatest brother I could ever have wished for. He always looks out for me, and he’s a genuinely lovely guy – a hero to the students at his driving school and to the kids at the local football club where he volunteers every Saturday morning. Oh and he cooks the tastiest shepherd’s pie ever! What else? He’s got an ever loving girlfriend called Lorna who means the world to him. I truly believe they are the ideal couple and I actually came on this site in the hope of finding my own version of Lorna. Is it possible that I’ve found her????

Kay read the message, looked one more time at the brother, then put away her phone. She was filled with heartache and indecision, but deep down she knew that Jeremy would never hear from her again.