My Biggest Lie Read Free

to her and listened to her voice rise and fall, when I laughed involuntarily at her stories and character assessments, when I plotted our adventures together, our happy ending, then there was nothing corrupt in it either. It was never the right time for us: I was not as forceful then as I have been since, and she either had an unsuitable boyfriend or I hadan unsuitable girlfriend and we were never in the same place long enough to make the unsuitability incontestable. Sarah couldn’t hold a job then (and perhaps now) for more than a year before she was bored and off somewhere – Korea, Brazil, India – to do another job and learn another language from another exotic boyfriend. These were years in which I could forget her except as a wistfulness, the warm promise of a distant reunion; make me happy, but not yet. I began to enjoy myself.
    It was in the gap between one of Sarah’s disappearances that I finally confessed how I felt to her. I had been single for a year, but she had a boyfriend back in Brazil, an artisan potter (they were always people with extraordinary occupations), and in her laidback way she assumed they’d stay together without being able to articulate how. In the meantime she had moved to Edinburgh for a job at the National Museum of Scotland, and invited me up to stay for a long weekend. It began on Thursday in a pub near her flat in Leith, one you reached by walking down a narrow street lined with prostitutes. We played a game – I can’t remember who started it – categorising all our mutual friends by whether or not we wanted to sleep with them. I was delighted at how many people she didn’t want to sleep with. Perhaps I lied a bit to suggest my tastes were less catholic than they are. And then we could no longer avoid it.
    Yes, she admitted, with almost entirely disguised shyness, she would.
    Yes, I admitted, rapturously, I would, I would, I would.
    The next day we climbed to the top of Arthur’s Seat and stood braced against each other as the wind tried to tear us off. On the way down her feet slipped and I caught her under the arms. She turned and looked at meincredulously, as if she hadn’t noticed I had been with her until that moment. I had to say something but I couldn’t.
    She never had the right clothes for the country she was living in. That day she was wearing a summer dress with shiny black tights and flimsy canvas shoes – a thick blanket of a woollen overcoat on the top donated by one of her new colleagues after she had arrived to work two days in a row in a soggy denim jacket. The cold rain began to hammer down as we reached the bottom and she was soon sodden. We took refuge in a pub. She had stolen a lipstick that morning from Superdrug and came back with cherry-pink lips and soaking hair. Her lips were so bright they seemed to belong to another dimension. She was wonderfully disorganised in the way she assembled herself and I expect she will always be like this. I hope so.
    I couldn’t take my eyes from her. Something was going to happen, something was so obviously going to happen that I felt on the verge of being sick in case it didn’t. In the end it was the word itself, unspoken for so long, that brought us together. That evening she had taken us to an ecstasy dealer’s tenement flat and later, in a basement dive bar, dancing to house music, I had put my hands on her shoulders and said it: ‘I love you.’ It was the kind of thing you said on an E, but not in that tone. We knew what it meant. Its inevitability stunned her. She took a step backwards and smiled a smile that was without guilt, despite the boyfriend she would have to get rid of in the next month, and we kissed our first kiss.
    We lay on her bed when we got home and she swam into a sharp new focus. She tied her hair back and I realised I had never seen her ears. They seemed enormous. She was suddenly a completely different person; her voice sounded more