White Lies (17 page)

I need to go home. I head back up to my locker but my supervisor, Sarah, pokes her head around a doorway, takes my arm and pulls me into the kitchen. “Tea?”

The inappropriate touching makes me shrug for no reason. She’s at least five years younger than me but she’s my superior, and I harbour entirely un-pornographic fantasies about her that are somehow even worse than just wanting to fuck her. I want to get to the point where we can sit around in our pyjamas taking the piss out of
Dancing on Ice
.

“I was just coming to find you,” she says, and the harmless offer of tea drops between us like a deadweight. “Mind if we have a word? In the office?”

I follow her in and finally look at her properly. There are tingles. I’m sort of embarrassed at my own body’s reaction to her face.

She swings on her chair and peels at the corner of a sticker on the filing cabinet. “Matt, there’s been a complaint about you.”

It’s probably not a good sign that I can think of several recent instances that might be relevant. I say: “Right.” Perhaps they’ll fire me. Then I can ask Sarah out.

“It’s not serious, but we have to follow it up. Well, you know.”

“Right.”

“A woman says you sighed at her.”

“I sighed?”

“In an impatient way. She was crying, apparently, at the time. You said ‘okaaaay’ and sighed. She’s written to the complaints department.”

I don’t remember this. Lots of them cry. They can’t find the money and we threaten them with bailiffs. Of course they fucking cry. I didn’t mean to sigh about it.

“I’m not sleeping very well at the moment, maybe it was a yawn.”

Sarah doesn’t say anything but also doesn’t stop looking at me. She swivels gently on the chair - a few inches left and then right.

“Well. Yawn or sigh, she’s upset.”

“Sorry.”

“Are you okay, Matt? You’ve been a walking zombie the last couple of weeks.”

Her voice doesn’t soften, despite her words. She has a curious, wholly indifferent hint of a smirk on her face. She expects me to try to make her laugh, take the piss out of her authority and flirt. Her total lack of concern relaxes me.

The headache presses against my temples from the inside and the brightness of daylight squeezes my face into a scowl. “No. Look, I need to go.”

“You just got here.”

“Yeah.”

She sighs. “What’s wrong with you?”

I rehearse it in my head for too long - an accidental dramatic pause. I drag the words out with a shrug and a kind of confrontational edge. “My brother died,” I say. “A couple of weeks ago.” I can’t finalise it with an exact date, even though I know it down to the hour.

“Oh my God.”

“And it was probably my fault.”

“The one you hated?”

“The only one.”

“Shit. Why didn’t you say something?”

“It was definitely my fault.”

“Matt… You should go home.”

“I don’t really want to.”

“You’d rather work?”

“No, but there’s a hole in my living room wall and my niece has gastro or something. She’s puking everywhere… ”

“Um. Do you want to talk about it?”

She pauses before she offers, like she doesn’t mean it, doesn’t actually want to claim responsibility for listening to my grief.

I shake my head, push my fists into my eye sockets. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

Now she sees it – the whole package – the sunken eyes, the atrophied smile, the swallow of tears. And she’s sold, apparently, on my pathetic, confused soul. She holds my hands over the table and pulses them with little caring squeezes. “Just go home, Matt. Fuck it, go home.”

#

By the time I get back to the flat, Clare is asleep in my bed, her right arm curled around a mixing bowl. I call Sabine because I feel bad about Sarah holding my hands. Her phone goes straight to voicemail. I turn on my laptop and open a new document to start writing my letter requesting compassionate leave, like Sarah told me to. I get as far as typing
the death of my brother
and have to turn it off. I try Sabine again. I know she’ll see the missed calls from me and roll her eyes but I can’t leave her a message and vocalise quite how desperate I am to speak to her.

She loved to tell me how much of a wuss I am. She said I have a timid face. She said that’s why she first spoke to me, evidently drawn to someone she could patronise and demoralise at will. I apologise to people who bump into me in the street, I check my invisible watch when someone asks me the time. I thank ATMs.

She has this ability to be honest to the point of rudeness, without seeming offensive at all. She has one of those faces that looks as though it should constantly be backlit against sharp, angular, film-noir set design. I miss her because of and despite the fact that we were totally unsuited as a couple.

I check my answerphone messages to make sure she wasn’t calling me back while I was trying to call her the second time. I have two saved messages and one new message, from ten-forty-seven a.m. today, while I was sitting in the kitchen at work with Sarah.

It’s Jamie: “Matty. Are you there? I need to talk to you.”

I haven’t seen him since the funeral where he stood blank-eyed and pale, barely-contained fury rising to the surface of his skin whenever he looked at me. I get it. He and Alex operated with almost supernatural synchronisation when they were kids, allied in the glee they found in treating me like shit. And he blames me.

Dad and Lydia looked on him with a mix of affection and suspicion. I think they secretly hoped that he was some kind of corrupt influence on Alex they could lay blame on. Of course it could never be the case that Alex’s antisocial unpleasantness was his own doing. When they were kids they called it the cheekiness of boys. When they were teenagers they called it rebellion. When they were young adults they were simply no longer within parental control.

“Look after your brother,” were my daily orders when we left for school, but no-one, apparently, was meant to look after me.

Before I hang up, the saved messages start to play, and even though I know I have plenty of time to avoid the misery that is about to occur, I do nothing to stop it. The first one is from Angie, a few days ago, asking how Clare is and telling her that she has some post to pick up from home. She hopes we’re both okay. Beep. I should hang up now. A muscle in my wrist twitches. But still I listen, standing up to the approaching pain with all the likelihood of jumping over a tsunami.

Second saved message: “Alright dick-brain? Are you going to see Dad on Sunday? I need a lift. And I downloaded something for you, I’ll give it to you then. Ring me back.”

Alex. Immortalised by BT, before he got the letter from his mum, before he drained two bottles of cheap wine and came knocking on my door. Before I killed him. I should be crying but I’m dry. My headache has mutated into throbbing and my jaw will not unclench. I can’t feel my fingers around the phone.

I found the birthday gift he’d meant to give me at his flat – a DVD of a new zombie film – still the only real connection we had. That, and the silent agreement to keep our mutual disinterest in football a secret from Dad, who used to demand full, religious concentration whenever Fulham played.

When I was twelve and Alex was eight, Dad took us to a home game. It was the last time he ever held my hand, keeping hold of us among the inescapable mass, the huge symbiotic entity of the crowd, rising and undulating and swearing all together. Indecipherable noise made up of the echo of thousands of voices, all a little late, out of sync, all chanting something that I never quite heard properly but it didn’t matter - I could sense the threat in it, the low murderous edge, the bite, the brick. A mob of testosterone. Alex fitted right in. I cowered in my cold plastic seat, clutching a gristly burger, trying to distract myself by counting the pieces of chewing gum on the seat in front of me. Someone had written ‘Steve is a penus’ on the seat-back – with accompanying illustration – then realised their mistake, crossed out the word ‘penus’ and replaced it with ‘cock’.

I confided in Lydia that I desperately didn’t want to go to the next game. And in typical, wonderful Lydia fashion, she had no qualms about lying to my dad, told him I’d been invited to a friend’s birthday party that day. Dad took Alex and Jamie instead and never asked me to come along again. Even though Dad couldn’t stand the kid, Jamie was a better son than I was.

Why the fuck is he calling me now? Whatever association we had should have died with Alex. What could he possibly want?

I press the phone against my ear until it hurts, the automated voice repeatedly asking me to make a fucking choice or return to the main menu. I hang up and call Sabine again.

“Hi,” comes a sigh, rather than a greeting.

I hadn’t actually expected her to pick up. Shit. “Hi.”

“I’m not going to ask if you’re okay. You’re not okay. Why are you calling me?”

“I miss you.”

“I know you do. I’m working.” A long pause, in which I suspect she is calculating how much straight-talking I can cope with. She acquiesces, uncharacteristically, says softly: “I’ll call you later.”

“Thank you.”

“Okay.” She hangs up the way people do in films, without saying goodbye.

I look in the fridge for some lunch, but there is only leftover funeral food.

#

I catch up with Clare that same afternoon, joining her in an alternating puke-fest that has us up for most of the night. It must have been something from the funeral spread - prawns on little blini pancake things probably. We shouldn’t have kept the food this long. Frozen, defrosted, hoarded in the fridge, as if it represented the last vestiges of my brother, the body of the fucking antichrist.

When the intervals between toilet visits stretch further and further apart and finally slow to dry heaves, we convene on the sofa, grumbling and watching early morning TV to try to distract from the pain of our stretched, outraged stomachs.

“At least you’re used to throwing up,” I say.

Clare can’t even muster the energy to swear at me, or hit me. It’s a nice change.

We doze for an hour or two. She goes off to sit in the bath. Behind closed eyes I listen to a TV medium channel messages from some woman’s dead daughter who wants her to move house and make a fresh start, maybe somewhere abroad. The mother says she likes warm weather. And the sea. The daughter was such a good girl, she says. She died of complications following a routine operation. The mother cries. The audience applauds. Someone knocks viciously on my door and the hole in the wall opens like a dark gaping mouth and my stupid brain immediately assumes Alex is back to claim his revenge and my shoulders start shuddering.

I’m hearing things. I’m going mad. Early-onset dementia. A tumour. Schizophrenia. A psychotic episode. A brain aneurysm. I turn up the TV but the knocking gets louder. Has he come to smash my head through the wall? I’m going fucking insane.

A muffled shout comes through the door. “Matty?” It really is him. I’m going to puke again. I lurch off the sofa and lean my forehead against the closed bathroom door. “Clare, let me in, I’m gonna throw up.”

“Who’s at the door?”

Fuck, it’s real then. She can hear it too.

“No-one. Let me in!”

“I’m naked!”

“Clare!”

“Matty!” yells the ghost. Except it’s not a ghost. I know that voice. I fall into a crouch and clutch at my guts.

“Matt, get the door,” Clare orders, and all at once she’s her mother and I have to do as she says.

Jamie looks worse than I do, if that’s possible. He has rubbed his eyes red and purple, the bags beneath them are swollen, the skin of his eyelids peels at the edges. His lips are cracked and pale against stubble at least a week old. Doesn’t smell like he’s washed much in that time either. At odds with the rest of him, his hair has been meticulously waxed into its usual style and he is dressed in a suit, as though stuck in his funereal mourning attire.

“Hi,” he says quietly.

“I’m ill,” I reply, lamely. “We’ve both been up all night being sick.”

“Oh. Is Clare okay?”

Don’t mind me. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Oh. Can I - Can I come in?”

“Why?” I didn’t mean to say that. He falters. I open the door wider and wave him forward. “Yeah, yeah, come in. Sorry about the smell.”

He makes a disgusted face but steps across the threshold. I have invited the vampire inside my home. He considers the sofa – covered with possibly infected and dribbled upon duvets and pillows, screwed up tissues, and an ice cube tray – but decides against it and leans on the kitchen counter instead.

His eyes fix on the hole in the wall. Mine still sweep by it whenever I look in that direction in a pathetic act of self-preservation. I hear him swallowing down thick spit as he forces his gaze away.

“He just fell over,” he says. “He didn’t even put his hands out to break the fall. Just keeled over. Like he was dead before he even hit the ground.”

I heard the technical story from the doctor but the most I had exchanged with Jamie since the accident was a nod at the crematorium.

“He wasn’t though. Dead, I mean,” he says, “I checked his pulse. He was still alive but he wasn’t there at all. You know? In his eyes.”

Shit, he wants to talk about it. All I can do is measure the distance between where I stand and the sink in case I need to throw up again.

“He wouldn’t let go of the letter,” Jamie says, glaring at me in an awful, wounded way. My stomach flips. We hear the gurgle of the plughole and Clare brushing her teeth.

“I need your help,” he says, jaw clenched tight, because clearly I am the last person he would ever choose to help him.

“What?”

“Alex wanted to find his dad. Meet him. His mum had put his name and stuff in the letter. He owns a load of restaurants.”

Clare appears in the bathroom doorway wearing my dressing gown and two pairs of socks. She stares at Jamie more vehemently than she’s ever looked at me and it’s a comfort to know her hate is indiscriminate. She walks tentatively into the kitchen and hangs on my arm. Jamie drops his chin like a reprimanded dog.

“So?” I say. “You want to track him down? Why do you need me?”