Lovers' Lies

By Clare Sandling, Jason Jackson, Nicol Wilmor and 19 more

This book is designed expressly for romantic Cynics and cynical Romantics. Be careful who catches you reading it – your intentions might be misinterpreted.

Join us as we wallow in the many facets of relationships. Explore role-play gone wrong, goldfish that eat loneliness, and a very literal leap into the unknown. Old love, cold love, true love, new love, dead love, we're through love – making babies and making whoopee, disappointment and contentment, playing at home, playing away or just playing; missed chances and new romances: everything from first conversation to last breath, strange journeys and stranger destinations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arachne Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781909208087

Book preview

Editor’s Introduction

Katy Darby

The stories in this anthology are drawn from the best of over five years of readings at Liars’ League – and not just our annual Valentine’s Day love-ins. We know that love takes many forms, from erotic obsession to unspoken admiration, so we’ve picked a beautiful mixed bouquet of fiction for you which will last a lot longer than a bunch of roses. Some are sexy, some sad, and some funny, but we hope all these stories will make you fall a little bit in love with them, just like we did.

The Danish-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose once said ‘Love and murder, murder and love. These are the only things worth writing about – and our authors have proved him at least half-right, with stories ranging from the comic to the bittersweet, and crossing countries and continents from the Mediterranean to Mexico, via Paris, Syria, Arizona, and of course London.

We’ve selected tales submitted under themes as remotely linked to romance as Art & Science (award-winning author Tania Hershman’s tender ‘The Painter and the Physicist’) and Birds & Beasts (Bobbie Darbyshire’s Eden reboot, and Tom Conoboy’s regional gothic ‘Cages Swinging in the Moonlight’). You’ll discover the darker (and sweatier) side of New York in Jessica Lott’s ‘Dara’ and Richard Smyth’s ‘This Isn’t Heat’, how to handle a bull in the lounge with Darren Lee’s ‘By the Horns’, and why Chinese is not the food of love in Alison Willis’s ‘Takeaway’.

If your literary leanings are more exotic, you can hang out with a mermaid, travel in time, experience ear-licking in an art gallery, and meet a goldfish that eats loneliness – but for the old-fashioned romantics, we’ve got some boy-meets-girl (and girl-meets-girl) tales too – even if the course of true love rarely runs smooth. Catherine Sharpe’s ‘Tasting Flight’ explores the wine-drenched hopefulness of internet dating, and both Nathan Good’s and Peter Higgins’s stories shine a light on love in middle age and beyond. Meanwhile, Rob Cox’s subtle and moving ‘Things’ reminds us of the love that remains, even when the beloved is lost.

We also have a brace of stories from Rosalind Stopps, who’ll cheer up the broken-hearted with two remedies for love gone sour (cheese and sport, if you’re curious), a sinister story of vodka and online shopping in Claire Sandling’s ‘Under the Influence’ – and editor Cherry Potts also contributes her own meditation on love, war and regret in the atmospheric ‘Mirror’.

Every month I look forward to reading the new crop of submissions for our latest theme: not just because I love short stories (which I do) – but also because I’m endlessly fascinated by the new and unique ways in which our authors interpret life, love and the world of words. We at Liars’ League don’t mind whether you think of this collection as a series of one-night stands, or snapshots from one rollercoaster of a long-term relationship – as long as you call us in the morning.

x x x

Katy Darby

www.liarsleague.com @liarsleague

Tasting Flight

Catherine Sharpe

A gorgeous meaty smell pulsed from the open hearth that separated the restaurant from the lacquered bar where Pen waited for Amy233, a first meeting. She was early, straight from yoga, trying to decide what she wanted. She ordered the Think Pink! Rosé tasting flight. If one was unpalatable, she could move on to the next. Not far from her bar perch, various meats and a tidy row of ever-larger fowl rotated with precarious dignity over licks of hickory flame – quail, bantam, duck. Duck, duck, goose. Pen could almost hear the sizzle of fat dripping, almost feel hungry. She tasted the first wine set before her.

Pen suffered displacement, having lost a day somewhere, or her voice, or an important list, or the spelling of her middle name. Perhaps her chakras were out of whack. They were whacked. Maybe wacky. Pen’s first chakra, her base chakra, even her second, and possibly third chakras, were undercharged. Or was it overcharged? One or the other. Her chakras were whacked, and her empty stomach soured at the first rosé.

The bartender smiled when he poured a French offering. Pen studied the sweating bottle, as if it revealed a matter of great interest, as if memorable. Mmmmmm, she nodded, but this one tasted sour, too. Shouldn’t pink wine taste sweet, more like candy, more like SweetTarts? Were her sense receptors whacked, too? Maybe she was miswired.

Plugged, unplugged. Or worse, tripped at the breaker. The heart breaker! Ha, thought Pen, with a bit of an ugly twist around her second chakra. Maybe just gas. Getting ripped on blush wine. Another symptom of a shocking chakra problem.

She balanced her elbows, sipped from the third pink. This one reminded her pleasantly of André’s Pink Champagne, prom night, and Henry devoted in his performance of true love, if not exactly straight. That stood for something! Her consciousness expanded.

Cologne. An older guy at the wine bar. All in his dark blue suit, Italian (the suit), and banana-coloured tie. Polish on his nails, Mister Advertising Man with his two-olive martini.

Well, hello, he offered. Yes, hi, she said. It seemed polite to take less space on her stool, to make more room for his elbows. Then, sudden as a rooster pecking an egg, he’s telling her about his stepson, Dismissed from boarding school! he said. First one wife, and then another one, this one with a miscreant son. Can you imagine? Pen could well imagine. The first wife’s aura, soft-shelled like a crab, a fading bluish-green – flushed out by someone younger, livelier, easier. But that son was trouble. Mister Disappointed.

Mister leaned close, with questions. He was handsome, in a fatherly aftershave kind of way. He popped an olive, grinning.

I like you, he said, for no good reason.

My date. Waiting for my date. She was vague, looking pinkly through her fourth taste. Feeling the cool wineglass soothe all the little foreheads of her fingertips. Oh, it was warm, so close to the open hearth.

Oh your girrrlllfriend, he said, all sly like a fox – sinful, silver fox. Mister Hipster. You bi? asked Mister Hipster Withit. Maybe my first wife was bi or even lesbian she was so angry. Is it easy to tell?

Sure it is, Pen said. Easy.

I thought so, Peg, he said.

It was easy to mix her up. This did not help her self-esteem (a depletion of the third chakra). She pictured her esteem in a dismal little pile, like underpants kicked under the bed. Her first and second chakras were probably in the toilet.

She needed the bathroom, but would she miss Amy233? It was 233? Not 223? What if she’d emailed back and forth with 233, but made a date with 223? There was probably more than one Amy. What if she was mixed up?

Pen often got mixed up with other people, the wrong kind of people, the not so nice kind, the cheating kind. She would get herself mixed up with someone else, forgetting her own name and such, thinking she was someone’s mirror, or mattress, or dishwasher, or any number of home furnishings. Then suddenly, her chakras were kicked under the bed.

Nose. Powdering, she said. Mister chuffed, elbows expanding, endangering her flight. But she was brave. She pushed away. Mister ordered another martini.

She walked past the open hearth into the ladies’ lounge, where she almost cried to catch the last strains of a Beatles song – Norwegian Wood or Eleanor Rigby; she always mixed those up – piped into the bathroom. She examined the full expression of her pinkness in the mirror, her raw nature. Only four-fifths through her flight, barely off the ground. She could leave. Could it matter? She cooled herself with water.

Pen came back to find her place crowded out by Mister’s wife and stepson. The woman – styled, fluid, cared for – took up little space alongside hubby and her droopy-lidded teenager. Like her mate Mister, the woman was very with-it, or at least with a lot of it.

Pen reached around them to recover her place, but her flight was gone. Flown. No empty coop, not even a ring of moisture. Pen had no seat, she was not grounded, she was ungrounded, she was a live wire dropped in a puddle, she was at risk of serious shock, unwarranted electrical discharge.

Did you see my fifth blush? Pen asked Mister. Mister shifted politely out of Pen’s way, unruffled, elbows tight, martini aloft.

I’m sorry? he said, as if to a total stranger.

At Pen’s question, Mrs Mister’s eyes flicked like a snake tongue over Pen’s face, her body. Pen could smell the sizzling arc of suspicion before the wife tucked it back in like a bra strap. The wife wiggled the knot of her son’s tie, then reached for her husband’s. Mister puffed his chest towards the missus, making his tie easier to reach. This helped Pen remember herself; remember why she was here, a least for a minute.

A water? Flat, please, she told the bartender. Soon Amynumber should swoop in, cupping the air for a skidding, hiccup of a landing.

Pen had other strangers to meet. She was open, her heart chakra was open. She watched the door closely. Open, open, open, Pen thought.

Surf and Turf

Mi L Holliday

There’s a girl on my living room floor, looking up at me from underneath sodden blonde curls and eyelashes clumped together in thick black triangles. The light of the TV renders the pastel orange of her mermaid skirt just barely visible where it clings to her legs, a scrap of fabric in a similar colour masquerading as a shirt.

I set my carton of lo mein down on the coffee table, ignoring the scent that tantalizes my all-too-empty stomach.

There’s a girl on my living room floor, and she fell out of my fish tank.

It wasn’t a big tank, just a little two gallon thing that barely fit the fat goldfish I’d had in there, the one suspiciously nowhere in sight, though by all rights it should be flopping around amongst the shattered ruins of its home.

I open my mouth, hoping something useful will come out and restore order to my night.

‘Did you eat my goldfish?’

She just blinks up at me. Her eyes are huge and dark, reflecting in quick flashes the bursts of colour from the movie I was watching. The movement on the screen must catch her attention, because she cocks her head in its direction before turning around fully, scooting up to the screen, nose so close I swear I can hear the soft static reaching out to connect with her wet flesh. A soft, unintelligible murmur drifts out of the speakers, but I have the sound down too low for much more than that. After a moment she reaches up one pale hand and pushes the volume button until the TV seems like it’s blaring. I wince, even though there’s no one to be woken up by it.

The girl pushes herself up off the floor, stepping across carpet that I imagine in better light would have her dainty footprints seeped into the cream colouring, a damp trail leading over to the couch where she settles lightly down next to me. She’s so close, the warmth of her