Faith - Lesley Pearse [40]
‘I don’t need to be ashamed of it,’ she murmured to herself as she took her coat off and hung it up in the wardrobe.
She took one more look at herself in her dress before taking it off. Her hair was coming loose now and she had specks of mascara under her eyes, but she decided she didn’t have to be ashamed of how she looked either. Steven had said he thought she was beautiful, and that was how she felt. As she carefully hung her dress up on a hanger she smiled to herself, feeling a little like Cinderella after the ball.
That Christmas, which Laura spent with the Thompson family, was the happiest she’d ever known. Not just because she was surrounded by good people and stuffed with delicious food, not even because the decorations, presents and games were far better than anything she was used to. The source of her happiness was the way Steven had treated her.
Jackie was convinced she was in love with Roger. She kept drifting off while she mooned about him, and she was counting the hours until 27 December, when she was going to see him again. She assumed that Laura felt the same about Steven, but Laura couldn’t quite bring herself to admit how it really was for her.
On Boxing Day night when the girls went to bed, Jackie could talk about nothing except Roger. ‘I gave him my number at work and at home. Which do you think he’ll phone me on tomorrow?’
‘Here, in the evening, I expect,’ Laura replied. ‘But be careful what you say about me, won’t you?’
Jackie sat up in her bed, looking across at her friend with a puzzled expression. ‘What do you mean?’
Laura was putting some rollers in her hair. ‘Well, I’d rather you didn’t say too much about my parents dying and my aunt leaving. It makes me sound a bit tragic.’
‘I don’t think it does. It just makes people admire you more for being strong,’ Jackie said a little indignantly.
Laura was embarrassed then. She went over and sat on her friend’s bed, but didn’t really know what to say.
She couldn’t tell Jackie the truth about herself, not after so long, but she was afraid of this lie going on and on, repeated again and again for the rest of her life. ‘I just want to be like anyone else,’ she said eventually. ‘You know what I mean. Normal.’
‘Well, you certainly can’t invent a family you haven’t got,’ Jackie said. ‘You weren’t think of doing that, were you?’
‘No, of course not,’ Laura said quickly. ‘But I did want to play down what happened.’
‘I won’t say anything more than that you are my best friend,’ Jackie replied. ‘I’ll leave it up to you to tell Steven as much or as little as you like. But for all we know we may never get the opportunity to tell either Roger or Steven anything. They might have girlfriends, they might not even like us.’
Laura put down her Biro and rubbed her eyes. She had only jotted down the major points of those early days with Jackie, barely a whole page. But the meeting with Steven and Roger was an important milestone in both their lives for more reasons than that they became their first lovers, and that much later Jackie would marry Roger.
Laura hadn’t of course known then what was in store for either of them, but that wasn’t the point when she should, and could, have come clean about her background to Jackie.
But she didn’t, and so the lie was spread further and further like a tumour. It was of course benign back then, but she might have known that if she didn’t cut it out it would become malignant.
It was one of the newspapers who exposed it at the start of her trial. She didn’t know who told them the story of her parents being killed while she was still a child, but they obviously checked it out and found it wasn’t true. It didn’t take them long to discover her real father had been a criminal, or for that matter to find plenty of people who were prepared to reveal she had lied to them