Writers’ conferences always brought out the most bookish of folk, reflected Axel. Then he bumped into Lulu.
They chatted genially about Gunter Grass and blogging, Georg Pabst and, funnily enough, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, when she dropped the unexpected.
“Thing is, my father was a donor. I was brought up by two women.” A throw-away line, but too good to miss.
Lulu described her painful upbringing, the teasing at school, “They called me the Lesbisch. I hated it. I wanted to commit suicide.”
It took several glasses of wine and dinner before she had finished. Axel listened carefully.
When he got to the hotel, he broke out his laptop and tapped out every detail. It was the character he was missing from his novel.
The novel was in the bestseller charts; the following year, he was invited back to speak at the writers’ conference.
“I doubt she’ll show,” he thought. But show she did and was waiting for him outside after his keynote.
“You’re a bloody thief!”
“It is not exactly your story.”
“You know it is.”
“All right, I took it and changed it. So what?”
A curious thing happened. She stepped back and smiled.
“Well, if you are a Thief, then I am a Liar.”
Axel was bemused.
“I made it up. Every word. None of it is true.”
“What? You must be joking?”
“Not at all, she said. “My father worked in the Post Office and my mother was a housewife. Later on she worked for the Red Cross. I had a completely normal upbringing in the suburbs of Bonn.”
Axel was so deflated he just stood there. Lulu reached up and kissed him on the cheek.
“Never mind, mein pet, once a thief always a thief.”
Axel did not have long to reflect; when he got to the bar, his wallet was missing from his jacket pocket. He looked for her at the conference the following day but she was nowhere to be found.
*
“If I became a liar,” said Mabel, “would you become a thief?”
“If you were a liar, how would I know if you weren’t also a thief.”
“If I was a thief, I would steal your lies.”
“If you stole my lies, I would have to tell the truth.”
“In that case, you would have become Axel.”