The Five Lives of an Ordinary Liar

How it begins

The invitation described Sylvia as a retired surgeon, diplomat, architect, concert pianist and marine biologist.

She had worked in a stationery shop.

For forty-one years.

The invitation was embossed.

Sylvia held it beneath the kitchen light and considered whether she could plausibly be dead before Saturday.

Mark rang the doorbell carrying a box of photographs.

"I thought we could make a display."

"Of what?"

"Your life."

"That sounds excessive."

He smiled with the fond impatience young people reserved for older people they had decided were modest.

Mark had lived next door when he was nine. Sylvia had helped him build a model bridge for school. She might have mentioned architecture.

She had not expected him to remember.

He opened the box.

A photograph of her beside a hospital.

A photograph beside an embassy.

A photograph holding a violin, which was particularly unfortunate given the pianist claim.

"People are so excited," he said.

"Which people?"

"The nurse you helped with her application. The woman who started the coastal charity. Your former student."

"I didn't have students."

"She says you taught her to trust her ear."

Sylvia remembered a girl crying outside the music school because somebody had told her she lacked promise.

She had said many things that afternoon.

One of them was that she had once played professionally.

The girl had stopped crying.

That had seemed worth the lie.

At the time.

Mark placed the photographs across the table.

Five lives, arranged neatly around the sugar bowl.

"And there's someone coming from the hospital."

Sylvia looked up.

"What hospital?"

"The one in your photograph."

"Why?"

"He wants to thank you for the medical advice."

The kitchen seemed to lose a little air.

Sylvia sat down.

For years she had thought of her inventions as small bridges laid across other people's loneliness.

She had not considered that somebody might put their full weight on one.

"Mark," she said, "we need a different kind of party."