Chapter 8
Thursday 5 October
When Kay was nine years old, she watched the film Groundhog Day , which inspired her to write a story called The Day I Lived Six Times . Her teacher was so impressed, she arranged to have it published in the school magazine. Whoever was in charge of putting the magazine together made an unfortunate typo, and the story appeared under the heading The Day I Lied Six Times . Kay was mortified at the time, but now looked back on it as rather prescient. These days, she reckoned she lied at least that many times before lunch.
Despite this, things were more or less under control, although the lie about the provisional licence might yet come back to bite her. She’d explained to Jenny at the driving school that she was in the process of changing her name from Kay to Elaine and hadn’t yet got round to telling DVLA. She begged her as a special favour not to tell Dan as she didn’t want it to become an issue. Jenny had looked unsure at first, so Kay had complimented her on her sunflowers and made a donation to her son’s school’s charity and after that the receptionist was all smiles.
*
Kay kneeled at the bottom of a flight of steps leading out of a subway underpass. She liked the contrasting light and shade on the steps, and how the banister rails paralleled the steps on either side – two upward-sloping straight lines with a kink halfway up for the landing. She would shoot this one in black-and-white. It would make a perfect opener for her Places in Between gallery.
Raising the Nikon’s viewfinder to her eye, she took some pictures of the stairway. Behind her, Sondra was, as usual, griping. “I’m cold, Kay, and this place stinks of tramp urine. How much longer do you think you’ll be?”
“Five more minutes, darling, tops.” This was only her fourth lie of the morning. She’d already told that Jehovah’s Witness she was a Satanist, and her mother that she was earning money from Flickr, and Mrs Michaels, her downstairs neighbour, that of course she’d read Nicholas Nickleby – she’s a librarian, and librarians have read everything.
Most lies were harmless, but some could end up hurting her. She couldn’t let Dan find out her real name, or that she worked at St Luke’s Road Community Library. If he asked about her work, she’d concoct some silly occupation – a small lie to protect a bigger one. Maybe she tasted dog food for a living – someone had to. Or she tested out beds for hotels, or hired herself out as a professional mermaid, or wrote online dating profiles – jobs she reckoned she’d excel at, if they existed.
She worried a little about Jeremy, and her meeting with him at the library. It would have been better if she’d given herself a different name at the driving school, but she’d grown quite attached to Elaine. At least the look she’d presented to Dan had been quite different from the frumpy old librarian Jeremy had met, with her ponytail, owlish glasses, puce cardigan, faded jeans and trainers. The new Elaine was stylish and distinctive in her outfit choices. She wore contact lenses and dresses and slingback heels, and never tied back her hair. Jeremy would almost certainly fail to recognise her, and if by some chance he did, she’d handle it with her famously marvellous flair for improvisation.
Oh lordy! Why had she talked herself into doing this? Did she really think Dan was that hot? Yes! Or did she secretly enjoy the intrigue and seat-of-your-pants adrenaline rush of deception? That too! Maybe she should have taken up acting for a living? It would have been a lot less dangerous for the people around her. She’d been in a few plays at university and really enjoyed them. She’d even thought at one stage that she might give acting a go, until a voice in her head (the same one that informed her she wasn’t clever enough to be a doctor) told her she lacked the talent to be an actor and had only got those parts because she was passably pretty and could learn lines. It was by listening to that voice that she’d wound up as a librarian getting her kicks by pretending to be someone else.
*
The subway steps looked wonderfully bleak and brutalist, she thought – the epitome of mid-20 th century totalitarian chic. But there was something missing from her pictures so far. The loneliest car parks, she remembered, weren’t the completely empty ones, but the ones with a single, solitary car. Those snaps always got the most likes on Flickr. Kay examined her grouchy, scowling friend. Sondra could almost pass for a 1950s Soviet woman, if not dresswise then certainly in attitude.
“Are you sure?” frowned Sondra when Kay suggested she act as her model. “I mean I haven’t got any make-up on and I’m not dressed nicely or anything.”
“You’re perfect,” Kay assured her.
“So where do you want me?”
“About two-thirds of the way up the staircase, a little past the landing. I’ll try a few shots of you walking up and then some more of you walking down.”
“And how do you want me to be? Happy? Sad?”
“Just be yourself darling.”
*
After they finished the shoot, Kay invited Sondra for a Starbucks as a thank-you for her patience. Kay had a Salted Maple the other part was on the kid and her performance. Voices! he laughed to himself. Classic!