Little Black Lie

Lying has never sat well with me. It was never something I made a habit of doing. White lies, grey lies, black lies – they’re all lies of equal dishonesty in my opinion.

That was why I was more shocked than anyone when I chose to do it. I had no experience of it, even in childhood. I’d been brought up in a strict, religious household. I feared my father like he was God. But when my little sister came to me, I felt compelled to help her. She walked into my building one day and let herself into my apartment with her spare key. That’s the level of trust we had between us. She was in tears – not just a few drops of sadness, tears were coursing down her cheeks and all over her clothes, she was talking and crying simultaneously, not a word she was saying intelligible. I took her by the arm and led her to the sofa and then I went to put the kettle on. Tea cured most things in our family. Even when my father doled out his harshest punishments, our mother would make us tea, like a small consolation, a sign she was quietly on our side.

I brought a tray into the living room and sat next to my sister Annie.

“Thanks Todd.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, genuinely concerned. Annie isn’t really a crier. She doesn’t tend to make a fuss about anything, so I knew something was off.

“I did something sort of bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“Promise you won’t tell a soul?”

“Have I ever blurted out your secrets?”

She seemed to scan her memory bank, failing to find a single instance.

“No,” she said, “That’s why I came to you.”

“Ok, so tell me.”

“I knocked someone down.”

“In your car?”

“No, with my handbag! Yeah. in my car.”

“Shit, are they ok?”

“No, I think they died.”

“Seriously? What did you do?”

“I don’t know, it was a hit and run.”

“You drove off?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I hope not. It’s not really something I have a great deal of experience with.”

“Ok, Todd, spare me your honesty lecture.”

“So, what do you want me to do?”

“Help me.”

“Help you what?”

“Hide it.”

“Did people not see it happen?”

“No, I was driving on our back road – you know that quiet one we played on as kids.”

“I’ve never seen another person on that road.”

“Exactly, that’s why I was flying.”

“So, what happened to the body?”

“It’s still there, well, unless someone found it.”

“So, what are you asking me to do?”

“Come with me, maybe help me hide it?”

The look of utter desperation in all her features made me feel like I had no choice.

“You’re driving,” she said, “and we need to stop at my house on the way to get some bin liners and a spade.”

She was talking like we were setting out to do a beach clean-up, or something equally innocuous. It was tricking my mind into thinking that what we were doing wasn’t all that bad. My sister had always been my confidante. We’d been through all the same crap with our dad, and she was the only one that got it. I didn’t have to explain anything to her. If she ended up in jail, it would have been disastrous. I was sure the family of the victim would have had the same thoughts if they knew their loved one wasn’t coming back, so we were sparing them in a way. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.

When we pulled up at the side of the road, mercifully, there was no blood loss we needed to clean up. It had been a clean hit, I told myself. It was almost like I had detached from the thought that it was a real person. The person on the road had become a giant dummy, a problem to be removed so we could carry on with our own lives. The body was heavier than anticipated. Annie took the feet while I took the head. We struggled over to the neighbouring woodlands. The ground was covered in loose earth: a perfect burial site. I never thought I’d be looking for one of those, but Annie nodded at me encouragingly. Her smile was unbroken. It was amazing how composed she was, since she knew I was going to help her. I was hiding something to protect my sister, so, I told myself I was doing it for the correct reasons.

I started digging while she wrapped the body. A crow flew overhead and then came down and perched on the hedge beside us. It watched intently, like it was extremely interested in what we were doing – that or it was an omen of something bad coming to us next.

It was sweaty work, digging that hole and it took an age. No one passed us. It was such a remote place that humans so rarely frequented that if one happened to pass, you probably could have passed what we were doing off as a normal procedure. Annie and I dragged the wrapped body and dumped it in the hole. We covered it with dirt and piles of leaves. The forest floor looked as it had whenever we arrived.

It was like what we had done had never happened. Maybe it hadn’t, I told myself. It could almost have been an ugly imagining. I couldn’t think of Annie as a murderer, or myself as someone that would cover one up, but here we were, and it was suddenly irreversible. We couldn’t exhume the body and put it back on the road coated in dirt, placing an emergency call and waiting for someone to arrive, no eyebrows raised. It was a done deed. It was time to get on with our lives, however much at odds with my morals I felt like our actions were. Annie was still my little sister. Whenever I looked at her, I still saw her as she was whenever she was a kid: innocent, supportive, not the perpetrator of a hit and run. She’d never been a great driver in the first place, so I drove us home, just to be on the safe side.