Jessie S Scotland is a compulsive, accomplished and repetitive liar.
Jessie S was born on the 15th October 1985. It was a Saturday (it's always a Saturday, that's the one consistent part) and her mother had been preparing for a quiet afternoon in while her father went to watch the football when Jessie decided that the time was now.
Jessie would have had a twin sister too, but the twin sister took about ten breaths of air before giving up, leaving Jessie squalling and alone in the bassinet next to her exhausted mother and confused, scarf-wearing father, still with the foam of a post-match beer on his top lip, or his moustache, depending on the day.
Jessie S lives in a terraced house on the outskirts of Manchester with her mother, her father and two brothers, one older and one younger and both somehow looking up to Jessie, even though they both towered over her. She is slight, like her mother and her father, but her big scary imposing brothers were built like Greek gods and were the perfect tool to threaten tormentors with. Jessie S's fictional monstrous brothers were the scourge of the town. Jessie S, safe in her fantasies, was never bothered.
Jessie leaves to study Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, before realising, quite suddenly one morning in bed that she would go no-where and switches that same day to a degree in Psychology. This is the less improbable of Jessie's facts; students are so want to switch degrees all the time and everyone knows someone who had an epiphany one morning while hungover, torn between throwing up on the stranger still in the bed next to you and throwing the sheets off and shouting carpe diem, seize the day, boys.
So Jessie S gets her degree in Psychology, finding it far less challenging than someone with three Arts A-Levels should, and upon graduating couldn't face the terraced house in Manchester with the brothers, the parents, and the floating little ghost of the sister. Instead, like every pilgrim in a graduate gown, Jessie S and her bags and her rickety bedframe go to London, to carve out a niche in the darkest corners of the pubs in N1. Jessie works part-time in a bar (she tells her parents), then gets a job as an editorial assistant, writing fractious copy for a trendy youth magazine (she tells her friends), while combining it with a part-funded post-graduate course.
Jessie lives alone in a studio flat overlooking the park. She gets up at 6.30 every morning and runs in the park and has a travelcard and a pension and a bag full of business cards and a keyring full of keys and a phone that is full of numbers, no names, so in the night when she wakes up scared or when she lies and stares at the ceiling she reaches for the phone and picks a number at random, Russian roulette-like, risks calling a family member, a friend, a shrink, a dealer, a lover, a confessor, to break up the silence of a life so populated with falseness. A key that opens the door to a huge room or a cupboard or that leads to another door, a window, an office or a safety deposit box where her true self is kept.
Jessie lives alone in a studio flat overlooking the park. She gets up at 6.30 every morning and runs in the park and has a travelcard and a pension and a bag full of business cards and a keyring full of keys and a phone that is full of numbers, no names, so in the night when she wakes up scared or when she lies and stares at the ceiling she reaches for the phone and picks a number at random, Russian roulette-like, risks calling a family member, a friend, a shrink, a dealer, a lover, a confessor, to break up the silence of a life so populated with falseness. A key that opens the door to a huge room or a cupboard or that leads to another door, a window, an office or a safety deposit box where her true self is kept.
Jessie S has told so many lies that the next one may well be the truth.
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