3. Technically, you’d have to say I’m a ghostwriter, and I know what people think about those. I’ve seen—online, when I’ve looked with Mum at those writing community forums she joined after she’d recovered from the Lambert-Gavey War—so much antagonism and derision directed at other writing collaborations involving a ghostwriter that I was determined not to get mixed up in all of that. Especially since Mum mightbe viewed by some as a “celebrity” (especially after the latest two glossy, multipage spreads: “At Home with Sally Lambert, Hoomum of the Furry Fugitive” and “‘Gone Dog’ Is Back; Family Speaks Openly about Ordeal for the First Time”). It’s when celebrities collaborate with ghostwriters that unghostly writers turn vicious.
My final main reason, 4, also explains why, even now, I’m telling you who I am without telling you. You might have noticed I’m not loudly and proudly stating my name for the record—first name, middle name, surname—even though I love my name. Mum thinks of it as a “tiny little poem” and I agree. Yet I’m leaving it out as a way of trying to get round the absurdity impediment. I can’t give you any excuse to say, “Oh, come on, that’s absurd!” and dismiss my story. People who aren’t me need to know the truth about me—the role I played in what happened—and I don’t want to risk shattering all the trust I’ve built up over many chapters of mature, authoritative narration by stating my name, which, shall we say, doesn’t have quite so much gravitas about it.
I feel like I need to try and explain the absurdity impediment, though it’s something those in Level 3 might find hard to understand. It’s kind of a Level 2 concept, and here it has a different name, one that wouldn’t make sense in the place where you’re reading these words.
The absurdity impediment is what’s at play whenever we fail to notice a situation’s moral significance on account of there being a strong element of absurdity involved. The Agatha Christie Book Club War is a perfect example: It’s dangerously easy to laugh and call it ridiculous when previously friendly neighbors suddenly hateeach other because they can’t agree about whether every book written by Agatha Christie should qualify for the label of “Agatha Christie book.” You might chortle and roll your eyes and say, “Oh, come on, you must be kidding!” and in doing so, you convince yourself there’s nothing important here to notice. As a wise person once said (I can’t remember who, sorry), “There’s no view from nowhere.” When you’re stuck in Level 3, you assume anything that’s hilariously ludicrous is as far away from serious and deserving of weighty consideration as it’s possible to be.
The truth is the opposite of that. It’s one of the first things we learn when we move up to Level 2: All too often, Evil wears a cloak of absurdity in order to be underestimated until it’s too late for Good to win. Why do you think most people in Swaffham Tilney—all but her tiny band of fervent supporters, the likes of Maureen Gledhill—now think of Deryn Dickinson as “a few sandwiches short of a picnic”? And it’s no coincidence that there’s almost a fondness to these kinds of insults—an underlying affection that implies relative harmlessness.
Yet think of what Deryn Dickinson set in motion when she could so easily have done otherwise: the heart-poisoning to extinction of the reading group she loved. It would have been both easier and more pleasant to compromise and includejust one novelof the non-murder-mystery sort that Deryn, who only cares if there are corpses strewn across every page, didn’t fancy reading. (Remember also that, according to Corinne,The Rose and the Yew Treeis as much a murder mystery as any of Dame Agatha’s other works, albeit in a subtle way and with no clear solution at the end. Corinne likes it all the more for that reason. She cannot bear mystery books inwhich the right answer is handed to the reader on a platter, having not gotten where she is today by relying on others to problem-solve for her.)
All Evil needs to do is wear a cloak of absurdity and no one will believe it’s happening. Champ’s case proves that. There were at least a thousand social media posts in June 2024 from people who argued that what the Lamberts’ supporters were claiming Tess Gavey had done was just absurd—too preposterous to be believed. “What, so a seventeen-year-old girl wakes up one day and lies for no reason? Pretends a dog savagely bit her, just because she wants to get that dog put to death? Even though he’s never harmed her at all? I don’t buy it. No one would do that. Why not, like, feed the dog some rat poison if you want to kill it? Much easier!” (*big sigh*No, it isn’t. Not if you want desperately to be a victim, and it seems most people do these days.)
Strangely, those very same doubters, without stopping to ponder the inconsistency involved, were also the ones declaring authoritatively that no one would do what the Lamberts had done: go on the run as a family to save their dog, leaving behind homes, jobs, phones, friends, entire lives—“Not for the sake of a ****ing dog. I mean, come on! I don’t buy it.”
I swear, as long as I live (that’s forever, by the way; the best bit of Level 2 is when you find that out), I’ll never understand how even a mind in Level 3 could be so dysfunctional. All those fools who confidently bashed out their “No-one-would-do” twaddle with angry fingers and broadcast it to the worldwhile knowing it wasn’t true.What they were loudly proclaiming no one would do, the Lamberts of Swaffham Tilney, Cambridgeshire, had demonstrably done.And, what’s more, we couldn’t have done it to any greater degree or a single jot more comprehensively than we had. This was a known and proven fact in Level 3 at the time, yet the absurdity impediment prevented so many from being able to avail themselves of the truth, just as it prevented Mum from realizing that Champ could swiftly be exonerated without any more driving around the country under cover of darkness. If Mum had only contacted Auntie Vicky as soon as she found out Auntie Vicky was repeatedly sending messages saying, “Ring me!!,” she could have spared herself a lot of mental suffering and saved us all a lot of time.
Why was she so determined to ignore Auntie Vicky? Well, because in her ideal world—the one she firmly believed should exist, instead of the actual reality in which she was embedded—nobody she trusted would have been engaging in unsanctioned, illicit communications with all kinds of people, therefore nobody would have (also secretly) given Auntie Vicky the numbers of all the Lamberts’ burner phones. An attempted communication that should never have been possible in the first place deserves to be ignored: That was Mum’s belief. Besides, she found it all too easy to convince herself that whatever her sister wanted was bound to be absurd—not worthy of her attention if Auntie Vicky deemed it vital.
Why had she decided this? Because of the Facebook business…
About a week prior to the first anniversary of the peach-stone munching that moved me up to Level 2, Mum started working on a Facebook post about how much she loved and missed me and also the strength of her hunch that I was totally still with her (I was: sitting next to her on the sofa in Shukes’s lounge and, unbeknownstto her, helping choose all the best photos of me, me and her, all of us Lamberts together), when her phone rang.
It was Auntie Vicky, who wasted no time on small talk. “Listen,” she said, “I know the twenty-fourth of August is coming up, and I just wanted to check: Are you planning on doing some kind of…death anniversary Facebook post?”
“Yes.” Mum winced at her sister’s phrasing. “We must be telepathic. I’m just picking some photos for it now. Don’t worry, you’re in one of them. Mum is too.” (By “Mum,” she meant Granny.Mymum was busy making sure no one would feel left out of her planned commemoration of my awesome life.)
“Right,” said Auntie Vicky. “The thing is… Could you… Look, I’m sorry to ask, but could you possiblynot?”
“Not?” said Mum. “You mean…?”
“Not put anything on Facebook about Furbert. Like, nothing at all? I’m sorry to ask, but… God, it’s so ridiculous, but it’s just Liam, you know? You and he are still friends on Facebook, aren’t you?”
“Ye-es,” said Mum, confused. Liam was Auntie Vicky’s ex-boyfriend. He’d lost a dog, a lovely ten-year-old English setter called Stilton, nine months after I moved up. “Vick, Liam will expect me to post about Furbs on the first anniversary of his death. He’d think it was weird if I didn’t. If you’re worrying it would be an insensitive reminder that his dog also died—”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Good, because grieving dog-parents feel better when they can console each other—”
“Sal, I don’t have time to—” A long sigh came from Auntie Vicky, who has at least three Blitz Your To-Do List planners on thego at any given time and, as a result, has almost no time to do any of the things on her endlessly duplicated lists. “Okay, listen,” she said. “I said nothing at the time because I didn’t want to have to deal with your judgment as well as Liam’s, but one of the reasons he gave for leaving me was that I didn’t respond to Stilton dying like I would have to the death of a human.”
“Oh.” Mum’s eyes widened.
Well, well, well, I thought but didn’t say.
“I’m sorry if you felt the same about my reaction to Furbert’s death, by the way.”
“I didn’t,” said Mum. “You sent a beautiful bunch of flowers. I was really grateful. So was Furbs, in spirit.”
True, I thought—but what nastiness was about to come at me down the pipeline? Something highly suboptimal, that was for sure. One thing they teach us in Level 2 is that deciding to make an issue, years later, out of something you originally kept quiet about is a sign of terrible character.
“Yes, I did,” Auntie Vicky said. “That’s right: I did send flowers.” Her voice had an unmistakable pitch of “So now please do as I ask” about it. “Look, Sal, I don’t want to ask you to block Liam on Facebook. I know you’d lose sleep about seeming unfriendly to a fellow…pet-grief sufferer. But here’s the problem. If you do a big, emotional post about Furbert, I justknowLiam will think: ‘Vicky’s so much worse a human than her lovely sister. How come Sally can have so much love for a dog while Vicky’s so hard-hearted?’ And…I just don’t want him having a chance to think that, because I’mnothard-hearted and I wasn’t about Stilton. I tried to be supportive when he died, I really did. I just… I’m sorry, but I don’t think somedog dying is as big a tragedy as the kind of suffering millions of people have to endure every day.”
Some dog…There was no mistaking the dismissiveness.
“Oh,” Mum said again.Do NOT mention any of the boring causes that you’re obsessed with, half of which are on the other side of the world and literally nothing to do with you or me,she snapped at Vicky in her imagination.I don’t give the slightest shit about any of them compared to my adorable baby Furbs, who I lost.
(I know it’s “whom.” We’re taught grammar in Level 2. But no one thinks “whom” inside their own head, not even the poshest person.)
