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‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘People who can’t swim don’t go in the water, which means they’ll never drown.’
‘What if you were on a ferry that sank or a plane that crashed in the ocean?’
‘I’d cling to the wreckage.’
‘You make it sound so easy.’
‘I’ve been doing it all my life.’
2
Cyrus
It never occurred to me that Evie might not be able to swim. It’s another reminder of how little I know about her and how much she keeps hidden, either deliberately or as a defence. She is the stereotypical enigma, wrapped in a riddle, bound up in a mystery, dressed up in three-quarter jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and chunky-heeled trainers.
Right now, she’s pretending to be bored because indifference is her default setting, being too cool to care. Evie is not a summer person. I don’t think she’s a winter person either, or spring or autumn. She’s a non-seasonal, all-year-round nihilist.
Across the beach, pale, lumpy bodies are in various stages of undress. Men with middle-aged paunches and spindly arms, wearing pale polo shirts and flip-flops. Women coated in oil, desperate to tan in case the rain moves in tomorrow. White-skinned children dotted with insect bites and smeared in sunblock and sticky with melted ice cream. Teenage girls in skimpy bikinis are pretending to ignore yet preening in front of teenage boys with pigeon chests and gelled hair. The British don’t do summer the way other Europeans do. To paraphrase Woody Allen, ‘We don’t tan, we stroke.’ Are people allowed to misquote him these days, or has that been cancelled?
Evie is observing all of this, but she won’t participate. She is one of life’s spectators, standing in the wings, peering at the audience through the curtains. Watching the watchers.
At the same time, I know that she’ll be inventing stories, populating her imagination with outlandish fantasies about people. When reality is too boring or mundane, Evie makes up an alternative version. She once told me her English teacher Mr Joubert had suffered a mid-life crisis and bought a Porsche Boxster and hair plugs. He also had a Russian wife, who’d been a ballerina with the Bolshoi and had danced for Vladimir Putin. When I finally met Mr Joubert, he was balder than a snow globe, and his wife was Welsh and had the heft and grace of a Clydesdale.
‘Why do you tell so many lies?’ I asked Evie.
‘Because everybody does.’
‘I don’t lie.’
‘Yes, you do.’
She rattled off a list of examples, like when I told our next-door neighbour Mr Gibson that I didn’t know who had run over his rubbish bin (it was Evie). And that I would definitely not encourage squirrels by putting up a bird feeder in the garden. Or when I say things like, ‘That’s so interesting’ and ‘I didn’t get your text’ and ‘I’m five minutes away’, when the opposite is true.
These are white lies, of course, and Evie lies all the time, brazenly, but she admits it and that, in her opinion, gives her the moral high ground. I wonder how she breathes in the rarefied air at that altitude.
I am one of the few people who know who Evie really is. Not the whole story, but enough to understand why she doesn’t trust people. How she was found hiding in a secret room in a house where a man had been murdered. How she spent weeks sneaking past his rotting corpse, stealing food from houses and drinking from garden hoses. How she had been imprisoned, tortured and sexually abused by people who can still threaten her if they discovered her new identity. That’s why she stayed silent, refusing to reveal her name or her age or where she’d come from.
When nobody came forward to claim her, she was given the name Evie Cormac by a judge, who made her a ward of the court, a child of the state, her fate decided by social workers and lawyers.
Since then, a few details have been added. I know her real name is Adina Osmani and she was born in a small village in the mountains of Albania. She was trafficked into the UK with her mother and sister, who died on the journey, but Evie doesn’t remember the voyage or has chosen to forget.
I met Evie four years ago at Langford Hall, a secure children’s home in Nottingham. By then she had fallen through every safety net that a modern progressive underfunded welfare system could provide. Twelve foster families had sent her back, saying she was too ‘weird’ or ‘creepy’ or ‘uncontrollable’.
Evie was claiming to be eighteen but had no way of proving it. I was the forensic psychologist sent to interview her, and asked to decide if she was ready to be released.
I knew immediately that Evie was different. Damaged. Mercurial. Self-destructive. Remarkable. Everything about her body language was defensive and closed off and antagonistic. I still see it now in the way she wraps her arms across her chest as though hiding her breasts; and the blowfly sunglasses and big hat. It’s like she’s wearing a permanent disguise.
I discovered something else about Evie at our first meeting – a defining detail that is unnerving and intriguing and heartbreaking. She can tell when someone is lying. I wrote my doctoral thesis on ‘truth wizards’, a topic dismissed as frivolous by most of my tutors and lecturers, all except for one, Professor Joe O’Loughlin, who encouraged me to continue.
The existence of truth wizards – a term I hate – had been documented for more than forty years and speculated on for much longer. Coined by an American psychologist, Paul Ekman, it describes a very small percentage of the population, about one in five hundred, who have the ability to tell when someone is lying, emotionally, verbally or physically. Ekman found that most of these ‘truth wizards’ had spent decades working as detectives, parole officers, prison guards, social workers, teachers or priests, listening to people lying day after day. Most picked up on micro-expressions or subtle changes to respiration or skin tone or intonation or behaviour. Like a poker player reading tells, they had learned to recognise bluffing or deceit or anxiety or doubt or overconfidence.
I don’t know where Evie learned this skill, but her ability is off the scale, and almost infallible. I could speculate on the reasons – whether her childhood abuse triggered a survival mechanism, or some other trauma gave her a savant-like aptitude. It is not a gift or a superpower. It is a curse. Everybody lies to the people they love. It is the glue that holds families and friendships together. The kind words and compliments; the accolades, promises and denials. For Evie, these are like landmines that only she can see. Every peccadillo and harmless untruth or exaggeration, every little white lie, can wound her. That’s why she’ll never have a normal life. Never be ordinary. Always be sad.
Three years ago, Evie came to live with me in Nottingham in a house that once belonged to my grandparents. We share chores and look after a dog, and I encourage her to be more outgoing and to make friends, but mostly to be kinder to herself because nobody can self-loathe like Evie. She blames herself for every bad thing that has happened to her and doesn’t believe she deserves happiness.
