White Lies (12 page)

She’d left the day after Matthew was born, but his birthday forever remained the painful anniversary of Heather’s disappearance. And Matthew had begun to ask questions about her. There were children in his class whose parents were divorced, even one girl whose father had died when she was three. But no-one else’s mother was a missing person, an invisible memory. Lydia and Alice carefully suggested that until he was a bit older perhaps it was better to tell him the simpler version of events, the one the police insisted on telling me, in which Heather was presumed dead.

I couldn’t do it. Even the half-truth was better than that. On the night before his birthday that year, his present from me was an attempt at honesty.

“Mummy is lost,” I told him.

“Where?”

“We don’t know.”

“How did she get lost?”

“She ran away.”

“Why don’t you go and look for her?”

“I can’t. I have to stay here and look after you and Angie and Alex. The police are looking for her.”

Matthew’s eyebrows lowered into a tense echo of my own. “When are they going to find her?”

“I think, maybe, she doesn’t want them to.”

“She’s hiding?”

“Yes. Sort of.”

Matthew’s voice became progressively quieter, and the pauses between became longer with each question, as his brain tick-tocked through the reasons for her disappearance.

“Will she come and live with us when she comes back?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if she’ll ever come back.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes people just want to run away and never come back.”

“I miss her.”

I couldn’t stop myself: “But you don’t even remember her.”

“I still miss her. I want a mummy.”

“You have Lydia.”

“She’s
Alex’s
mummy. And Angie’s.”

“She’s yours too. She loves you.”

“I want mine.”

He wasn’t even angry. That came later. At five, he was lost. Just like her.

“I know,” I said quietly. “I know.”

“I miss her.”

“Okay.”

“Does she miss me?”

“I bet she does.”

He knew I wasn’t any good at this. His face crumpled into a sneer of pain. “You’re lying.”

#

The birthday guests were gone when I returned from the pub. Alex was asleep, Matthew was sitting on the kitchen counter, crying, and Lydia was on the phone. I drop into my younger self again as the front door closes behind me, though just a footstep ago I had been in the garden with Graham. Doorways inside doorways. I lean against the kitchen worktop, ale in my belly, burnt paper and Golden Virginia on my tongue.

“What’s going on?” I ask her, even though I know what happens now.

“ - I’m so, so sorry. I’ll be round in a minute,” Lydia says down the phone. She hangs up, pats the receiver a few times, sighs.

“Who was that?”

Lydia puts her arms around Matthew and pulls his face into her chest, speaking in a quiet voice over his head to me. “The kids were in the garden. Matthew says they found the shed key in a flowerbed and went to play ‘club house’ in it.” She adjusts her arms around Matthew’s head to cover his ears, and continues. “They found Suki in there.”

I made my face blank. Lydia took it for incomprehension, when really it was cold, sick remorse.

“Suki,” she says, “Graham’s cat? She must have got locked in. She was dead. Frozen solid.”

“Oh.”

“I just called next door. I said I’d bring the body over to him. Can you do it? Please?” She jerks her chin at the party paraphernalia still spread across the living room. “I need a drink.”

I nod slowly, rub the back of my son’s neck and kiss Lydia’s temple. There’s a pattern in these recollections and there’s an uneasiness in my lower intestine that is more than ageing decrepitude. I’m being punished by a ghost of Christmases past that has no intention of allowing me to redeem myself - it wants me to see what I’ve done before I forget it forever.

#

I stand stooped in the shed with the cat in my arms, its little body stiff and wrapped in a towel. I wonder whether it was the cold or hunger that killed it. I take a spade, too, let myself out of the back gate and in through Graham’s. He is waiting for me at the back door, red-eyed.

“I’m sorry. Here,” my voice rumbles as I pass over the cold little bundle. Graham doesn’t reply, seems to be struggling to withhold whatever he thinks of me. I turn my back on him and look for the patch of soil at the end of the garden where I know there should be a cat-sized grave.

My palms blister as I chip away at the frozen ground. Turning the soil raises the deep scent of peat and chalk - a last embrace for Suki the cat. The winter wind burns my face but the work makes me sweat, and though it takes longer than I remember, I wish I could dig on and on. Room enough for all of us.

Graham goes back inside, reappearing a little while later with two cups of tea. We stand and admire my pathetic handiwork. I wonder if he spat in my mug.“She liked to sleep on the compost bags in there,” I say. “In the shed.”

“It was an easy mistake to make,” Graham replies woodenly, putting his tea down and taking a turn with the spade. He makes quick progress with the warmer dirt beneath the topsoil I broke open. I was irritated, first time around. Now I only watch, straining against the trappings of this younger, stupider, angrier version of myself. I take charge and stumble into a flower bed, scrabbling for a few lengths of tomato stakes which I tie together with bindweed to make a makeshift cross. I lay my tribute next to the towelled corpse and watch my neighbour’s wheezing breath dissolve into the air above our heads.

Satisfied with his grave, Graham ceremoniously pours the dregs of his tea into the hole before lowering the cat gently into place. I stand silently, hands clasped behind me in practised funereal manner, waiting to cringe at the feline eulogy I expect to hear. Instead, Graham simply scoops up a spadeful of soil and begins filling in the hole. I help with my hands, eager to warm my blood again after standing in the cold for so long. I wish for the overzealous heat of The Farm House, for heat packs and blankets and biscuits. When the grave is filled in, Graham positions the wooden cross at its head, collects up our mugs and leaves me standing there.

At the back door he pauses and looks back, eyes squinting against the wind. “Tell Matthew happy birthday,” he says.

“I will.”

“Thank you.” He nods, just once, at the grave. “I appreciate your help.”

I pick up my spade and swallow the bile that has risen into my gullet. “Okay.”

This time it is Graham’s smile that lays an ill-at-ease blanket over the garden, and I am not able to return it.

Walking through the garden gate brings me to my knees, into a different pair of knees, inside a different skin, but the guilt remains.

#

The changes come quicker.

The transitions jar my bones and leave me in a perpetual state of jet lag.

I return to the nursing home. I’m on my knees in my bathroom in trousers soaked with urine, clutching at the shag pile shower mat while waves of gripping aches build and die away in my stomach. The throbbing in my broken arm is the only thing that is new. The past is filling me up and threatening to burst, oozing out of my ears. A nurse appears behind me, tells me to stay put, not to worry, but my bedroom doorway has become frantic again, urging me through and turning the room around me into an unbearable desert that I am forced to flee if I am to breathe, if I am to live. I obey. And I am somewhere worse.

I am staying at my aunt’s house while my mother has a nervous breakdown and my father is embalmed at Morleigh the undertaker’s, three doors down.

My mother is a war widow even though the war is over. I am partially orphaned. I am six, and embarrassed that my dad did not die in combat. He wanted to be a pilot, but a perforated eardrum made him an engineer instead. A collapsed hangar during an air raid left him half deafened, which is why he did not hear the fire engine that ran him over.

My aunt lives alone, but I have never counted fewer than four people in her house at any time. I’m not sure her door even locks. No-one knocks, and my aunt never shows any surprise when visitors let themselves in. I can hear her in the kitchen below, noisily rolling out dough, telling my not-real-aunties Joyce and Mary about my poor devastated mother who is currently drunk and unconscious in the bedroom next to mine. I sit inside my aunt’s wardrobe and stroke her rabbit fur coat, blowing tracks through the black and white hair to reveal the pale dead rabbit skin beneath. My uncle’s clothes still hang next to hers, just as my father’s still hang next to my mother’s at home; dead men’s clothes. The stink of mothballs makes me sneeze.

I have toothache and gut ache and brain ache because my breakfast consisted of jam straight from the jar. My aunt believes that letting me do stupid things will encourage me to make the decision not to do them again. My mother believes that shouting and a crack round the head will help. But my mother hasn’t spoken to me since they came to tell us about my father. She clings to the bed as though adrift on a rough sea and wipes away her tears with his coat.

The fireman who ran him down brought my father’s black coat to our door late Friday night. It’s stiff and brittle with dried blood but she won’t let my aunt wash it. She rubs it against her face, even when she’s not crying, and the salted tears and rough wool leave her skin raw and flaking.

My aunt shouts up the stairs for me to come and help her cut out scones. I wipe my nose on one of my uncle’s hanging shirtsleeves. My mother retches in the spare bedroom. Through the half-open door I watch her stumble to the bathroom and lock herself in. I press my teeth with my tongue. They twinge. Maybe I’ll just have butter on my scones. Maybe I should go and see my dentist, Alma.

Chapter Eleven

Dad is having a bad day. The nurse put it fondly – “off with the fairies” – when she let me into his room. I’m not sure which fairies he’s with, but he is standing at the window pulling long orange threads out of the curtains, somewhere between anxious and content.

Today there is no reaction to Alex’s death, even when I turn it into a terrible form of poetry: “Dad. Alex is dead. Alex is dead, Dad. Dad, he died. Alex died, Dad. Alex. Dead. Dad?” And after that I continue on with my list. A reverse confession of sorts. A catalogue of every time Alex was a little shit when we were kids.

“The swimming competition.” I say. “I was fifteen.”

Dad ignores me, tapping on the glass like he’s saying hello to a squirrel or a bird or something. My father: Doctor Dolittle. The man who once threw next door’s cat over the fence for pissing on his irises. He fucking hated that cat.

“Swimming, Dad,” I say again. I was going to represent the school in front crawl. I had underarm hair and everything. I was starting to get pecs, lose some of the puppy fat. There was a girl. Harriet. She was coming to watch me compete. My dad doesn’t know this story. He didn’t come.

I sit in his armchair and talk at my knees. “It was summer. You know how hot my room used to get?” It was a south-facing oven, the sun kept at bay by thin polyester curtains. I used to sleep in just my boxers with no duvet. I should have known to watch my back.

Dad turns but doesn’t look at me, doesn’t seem to even know I’m there. He opens the wardrobe and sifts through his shirts, looking for something - his grasp on reality, the way through to Narnia.

“The night before,” I say, “Alex wrote TWAT across my back in black indelible marker while I was asleep.”

Dad snorts. My head whips up. Is he laughing at me? His eyes squint and he sneezes loudly into a shirt, wipes his nose with a sleeve and continues his search.

“Yeah, well, as you can imagine, I found it hilarious. Little fucking bastard. And that’s why I hit him with that tennis racquet.”

I was going to hit him with a chair but thought better of it at the last moment. Alex took advantage of my brief moralising pause to run into the hall. As I followed him, the nearest thing I could grab was Lydia’s tennis racquet. I hit him twice. Once on the ribs on his left side, and once on his back as he fell down. He had curved bruises and criss-cross welts for two weeks. When Dad found out, he smacked me round the head so hard I missed a good thirty seconds of his shouting tirade. I tuned back in to “ - despicable! He’s only eleven! I can’t even look at you, get out of my sight!”

I didn’t tell him about the skin graffiti. I knew he’d only laugh, and that would be worse than the smack. I shut myself in my room, hooked a chair stacked with heavy books under the door knob and smashed all my swimming awards into little shards of plastic men. Pointless self-destruction as a gut reaction - as if it would temper the punishment I was about to receive.

“I had my first cigarette that day, too,” I tell my father’s hunched back. “I stole a packet out of Lydia’s sock drawer when you took Alex to casualty.” Dad was convinced I’d broken the little shit’s ribs. I hadn’t, lucky for me. Unlucky for Alex, who could only stand two days of a cultivated limp before finding the poor cripple routine too tiring to maintain. “I went down the end of the garden and smoked three in a row. Graham from next door saw me and said he’d heard you shouting.” There was always a lot of shouting. Graham would appear on his patio feigning plant-watering or buddleia pruning so that he could peer over into our kitchen window with enlarged, concerned eyes.