Ann Troup - My Mother, The Liar

Not that she knew who it was for yet: the mother she’d believed was dead, her father for the lie, or her gran. But you didn’t get angry with Gran. Life wasn’t worth living if you got on her wrong side. As much as she was loving and kind, she could turn, and when she turned, she turned nasty. No, Gran wasn’t the one she could run to, not about this. Not about anything that challenged her cosy world. Now that she had locked the emotions down, she could be rational and work out what she needed to do. Because she had to do something.

Rachel’s address was etched into her mind. It was simple. She would go there and confront the woman who had faked her own death to abandon her family. Amy wanted to know why, and she wanted to know now.

Back in the house it took only moments to look up train times and find that if she was quick she could be on a train in forty-five minutes and in London an hour and a half after that. She took the letters and stuffed them in her backpack. She also took her father’s secret stash of cash. Five hundred pounds, rolled up and secured with an elastic band and kept hidden in a piece of spare waste pipe in the back of the sink unit cupboard. He thought she didn’t know about it, but she had watched him many a time unscrew the dummy pipe and store his money. He owed her for all this, so she wasn’t going to feel bad about taking it.

As she headed across the sitting room towards the door, she looked towards the mantelpiece and saw the photograph of her father holding her. She had been about four and was sitting on his shoulders and they were both grinning at the camera. It was a mutual favourite picture and she couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been on display somewhere in the house. The sight of it stirred the feelings she was trying so hard to suppress.

She picked up the picture and hurled it against the wall, wincing as the image shattered, littering the floor with tiny shards of glass. She was sick of it! It wasn’t real. None of it had been real. Not this house, not her dad, not this life. For good measure, she followed the picture with the plate of cold pizza, watching in satisfaction as it slid slowly down the wall, leaving a trail of cold congealed gunk in its wake.

Satisfied, she stalked from the house, slamming the front door so hard that the glass pane at the top cracked from the impact.

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