Sophie Hannah - The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

‘Gross! This story’s a pure freak-out, every time,’ one of the girls said, wrapping her arms round herself.

‘She lashed anyone who called her Martha. Even her mum and dad had to start calling her Mary.’

‘Lashed?’ Simon interrupted. He had to ask.

‘What? Oh, it’s, like, an expression?’

‘Translation for Villy outsider: she got really angry with anyone who called her Martha.’

‘And she lost weight when she turned into Mary. She was a pure tubber before.’

‘She was pining, wasn’t she, for her one true love?’

Simon couldn’t think clearly with the girls chattering at him. ‘Do you know why she chose the name Mary Trelease?’

They looked at one another, silent for the first time. ‘No,’ said one shirtily after a few seconds, annoyed to have been caught out. ‘What does that matter? A name’s just a name, isn’t it?’

‘Yes it is, Flavia Edna Seawright.’ More giggles erupted.

‘Her name’s not the only thing she changed after her resurrection , I know that,’ said Flavia, in an attempt to divert attention.

‘Oh, yeah-how weird is this?’

‘She used to be a writer-she had a book published.’

‘Yeah, there’s a copy in our house library.’

‘She must have been in Heathcote, then.’

‘No, Margerison.’

Simon understood the signs he’d seen. Boarding houses .

‘What house she was in is so, like, trivial? She was a writer, but after she hanged herself and it didn’t work, she never wrote another word-she took up painting instead. Not me personally, but loads of Villy girls have seen her wandering around at night, smoking, covered in paint…’

‘Didn’t Damaris Clay-Hoffman stop her and ask her if she had a spare ciggy?’

‘Damaris Clay-Hoffman’s such a rank liar!’

‘Where’s her cottage?’ asked Simon. ‘Don’t come with me, just tell me where,’ he said to the girls. He wanted to approach quietly, not with a screeching chorus around him.

As Flavia Edna Seawright pointed to her left, a loud noise, like a small explosion, burst out of the night. ‘Oh, my God!’ she said, grabbing Simon’s arm. ‘I’m not even joking any more, man. That sounded like a gun.’

‘A stupid mistake,’ says Mary. ‘You said “Go to your parents’ house”. You meant Cecily’s house, didn’t you? I could see from your face that you knew. You’re a bad liar.’

Pain burns all the way through me. There’s a bullet inside me, metal in my body. I saw it coming towards me, too fast for me to move. I’m lying on the floor. I reach out for Aidan’s hand, but he’s too far away.

‘You’re a… good liar,’ I manage to say. ‘You’re Martha.’

‘No. Martha died. Her heart stopped. Her mind stopped. You can’t die and be the same person afterwards. I’m one of the few people alive who knows that’s not possible.’

‘Abberton… the names…’ I try to raise my head, to look down at my body, but it hurts too much. I can’t move and think at the same time, and I have to think.

‘What about them? What about the names?’

‘Aidan didn’t destroy your… paintings. You did it to him. You bought…’ I can’t go on.

She looks down at me. I feel light; not a person any more but a weightless flow of pain. My mind starts to hum; it would be easy to fall into that comforting sound, allow it to roll me away. ‘He did it,’ Mary insists. ‘He took all my pictures and he cut them to pieces.’

‘No.’ I gasp for air. ‘The names… boarding houses…’

‘No!’ Mary raises her voice. ‘I’d never do that. He did it. He did it to me.’

‘You bought his pictures using those names.’ Each breath is a struggle, but without the struggle there would be nothing, no energy to stay alive. ‘You… made him come here…’ My mind fills with words that would take too much effort to say. He didn’t want to see you again, but you bribed him: fifty grand for a commission. ‘He stopped painting because of what you did.’

Scenes from the story Mary told me drift back into my mind. One half true, the other half lies. The cottage door left open, as she said. Aidan walking in, looking for her. Finding her standing on the dining table with a rope round her neck, his ruined paintings on the floor in front of her. Did she tell him what she’d done and then jump? Two shocks for him, locked together in one moment for devastating impact. That’s why he couldn’t move at first, why he didn’t rush to save her life. He was traumatised, paralysed.

‘My gardens.’ Every word wrings sweat from me. ‘Not Aidan. You did it. One last summer, to punish me for… Saul’s gallery. I frightened you. You hate not… being in control.’ The second after Charlie Zailer spoke to you on Monday and told you I was Aidan’s girlfriend. You’d given me Abberton as a gift, without knowing: another loss of control. Another punishment.

‘What about your dead boyfriend?’ says Mary impatiently, leaning over me. ‘What about what he did?’

I close my eyes. I know what he didn’t do. He didn’t lie to me. Not until later. Even then, he didn’t lie outright. To the police, yes, but never to me. ‘He killed Mary Trelease,’ I breathe. ‘Years ago.’ He was telling the truth when he told me that, at the Drummond Hotel. It was before I mentioned Abberton , before his confession had made me freeze, when he trusted me without reservation.

The woman I can only think of as Mary bends over me, using the gun to push her hair away from her face. ‘What Mary Trelease are you talking about?’ she asks. ‘Who do you mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Exactly. None of this involves you. You should have gone away. I sent you away.’ I hear this as an accusation of ingratitude. She’s appalled by me. ‘Whatever you think you know, you’re wrong.’

Anger kicks in, as intense as the pain. ‘I know everything but who she was. She lived at 15 Megson Crescent. Aidan killed her there.’ In the front bedroom. Her naked, in the centre of the bed, Aidan’s hands round her throat…

‘He killed her, and let his stepfather take the blame,’ says Mary patiently, putting her face in front of mine so that I can see her telling me. ‘His stepfather’s been in prison for twenty-six years, and Aidan’s left him there to rot, never visited him or written to him, not once. How do you feel about him now, now that you know that?’ Her words drift past me without taking root.

‘The house,’ I say, my lungs aching with the effort. ‘That’s why you bought it. Why you changed your name to hers.’

Mary points the gun at my face. I close my eyes, wait for her to shoot, but nothing happens. When I open them, she hasn’t moved. Neither has the gun. ‘Why?’ she says.

I can’t answer. I don’t know how much blood I’ve lost, though the sensation of losing it is constant. I feel transparent. Hollow.

‘It’s up to you. You can talk or you can die.’

‘No! Please, don’t…’ I try to turn my head away from the gun.

‘Did you think that was a threat?’ She laughs. ‘I meant that if you talk, if you start to tell a story, you won’t let go until you get to the end. For your mind to keep working, your heart has to keep working. You have to stay alive.’

She’s right. Not everything she says is a lie. The story of Aidan and Martha, right up until the point where she hanged herself, that was all true. Except… yes, even the part about Mary writing to Aidan, berating him for treating Martha badly. Not literally true, but symbolically accurate, as accurate as she could be without revealing her true identity. There are divisions within every person. Especially those who are forced to bear unbearable pain. The Mary who wrote angry, accusatory letters to Aidan-though she wasn’t called Mary then-was the intelligent part of Martha Wyers, the part that could see the truth: that the relationship was going nowhere, that Aidan didn’t love Martha the way she loved him.