White Lies (18 page)

Jamie looks like he wants me to collapse on the spot like Alex did. “I don’t know, I thought you might want to make amends.”

“For what?” I ask slowly.

Jamie shifts his weight away from the counter in a subtly menacing movement. “What do you think? He’d still be alive if it wasn’t for his selfish fucking brother,” he says quietly, emphasising the last three words as though he were stamping on my face.

Clare, to my deepest horror, doesn’t leap to defend me. She stays silent for a telling second before speaking in an unconvincing monotone: “Alex was the one who tried to hit him. It was an accident.”

“Well. If I were you I’d feel guilty,” Jamie says. “I’d want to do something. His real dad should know he existed.”

His passive-aggressive calmness makes me itch. “What the hell would I say? ‘Hi, you had a son, but now he’s dead. Oh and his mum’s dead too. Just thought you should know. See ya!’ What is the fucking point?”

Jamie points at the hole in the living room wall but I can’t look at it. “Because it was the last wish of your dead brother.”

Clare nods slowly beside me. Frustrated anger shoves the nausea aside. I follow Jamie’s eyes to my keys lying on the counter. And then it’s clear.

“And I’m the only one with a car,” I say.

He shrugs. That’s settled then. Perfect.

Chapter Fourteen

When the kitchen boy comes by my room I mistake him for Alex at first - he has little grey eyes and a hairline further back than his age should suggest. A flash of my boy for a moment, before my smile weakens and he tosses a small green cling film-wrapped rectangle onto my bed. He nods, closes the door, and leaves me feeling like I’ve been knifed in the chest. I hold the package in my lap for an hour until the warmth sends a sweet incriminating scent into the air and either I fall asleep or I lose an hour or two on standby, because I wake to my dentist cupping my face with a cold hand asking, “Where did you get this, Peter?” and telling me to hide the weed, pressing it into my palm and closing my fingers around it.

Another leap through time. Her hand is replaced by the frozen slap of a pre-rain wind that stings my cheeks. I am on a bench, oddly positioned halfway up a small bank that leads to a cow field, facing the uninspiring view of the nursing home’s conservatory. I find the cellophane package in my pocket but I don’t know how much of the stuff to put into my cigarette so I opt for half green, half tobacco. My hands shake as I try to get a decent handle on my lighter. It feels too late to be engaging in a rebellion but as the first draw enters my lungs I can’t help but grin through the conservatory window at the loathsome vegetables fused to their armchairs.

I smelt it on Alex and Jamie’s clothes when they were teens. I saw it in their reddened eyeballs and dry lips. I watched them eat a loaf’s worth of toast and stretch themselves out on the sofa, playing Uno as though it were the funniest game in the world. I didn’t tell Lydia, didn’t want to give her the satisfaction that her kid was as wayward as she secretly hoped he’d be. I cornered Matthew instead, assuming or perhaps just deciding that he was responsible. He rebounded my lecture back at me with silent hatred.

I sink lower on the bench, imagining that it is considerably more comfortable than it really is, and watch Paul, my room-neighbour, as he takes a slow, limping stroll round the garden. I smile fixedly at him, knowing that nothing I do will prevent him coming over to talk to me. The other residents have been drawn to me like iron filing slivers to a magnet since the last stroke, since my vocabulary shrank to a variation of grunts and open vowels, occasionally interspersed with short bursts of lucidity. My silence gives them free reign to wax on without interruption, safe in the knowledge I have little inclination to escape their presence and small chance of organising my tongue to interject. Paul creaks his way down next to me and lets out the practised elderly sigh of exhaustion.

“Beautiful day,” he says.

The sky to the east is full of billowing black clouds, the air sharp and cold, the grass churned up into a no man’s land of mud, cigarette ends and the occasional piece of cat shit.

“Mmmm,” I agree.

He sniffs, eyes me sideways. I take another drag.

“Visitors for me, today,” he says.

“Hum?”

“Your boy coming later?”

I shrug. I have little concept of what day it is any more. I wouldn’t blame Matthew if he took advantage of that fact and never came again.

“Lovely to have your daughter working here, though,” he says.

She’s not really my daughter,
is my unspoken, automatic response. Just as well I can no longer speak these stupid thoughts - I am less hurtful without my voice. I lie with a nod. It’s not lovely at all. It’s intolerable having a constant witness to my deterioration.

“She’s a sweet girl,” he says. “So attentive.”

I vaguely recall shouting at her – something about seafood – and the way her eyes, which are just the wrong colour to be her mother’s eyes, looked back at me as if she were screaming: “I’m
this
close to giving up on you,” and then, worse: “But I won’t.”

My vision begins to pick up colours that previously hadn’t appeared to be there. My body swells inside itself and I silently bless Ingrid and the kitchen boy, sinking into the sensation of my shoulders lowering in relaxation despite the wind and the hard back of the bench and the idiot keeping me company. This is what the Tai Chi fella should have given us.

“Not like my Sharon,” Paul mutters.

“Hmm?”

“She won’t stop moaning about her Franklin. Honestly, if she’s going to worry about every little thing, is it any wonder he’s such a needy creature?”

I close my eyes and bask in the angry warmth of Paul’s shift into phase two of the long march to death: exasperation and disgust and mass disapproval of, well, everything.

Paul expostulates his vast and judgemental opinions about his whining daughter, his saintly son-in-law, their brattish child who he believes has been spoilt beyond all belief through their ‘modern parenting’, how things were so very different when his daughter was a baby, how Paul wouldn’t have put up with half of what she does.

I nod, blow smoke rings, and call him a bastard inside my head. I might have ended up with the same pathetic point of view had Heather been around to raise Matthew, had I not lost my hand and ended up as a househusband while Lydia kept us afloat. I was the teacher, the comforter, the packed lunch maker, the organiser, cleaner, cook, wiper of arses and noses and taxi to appointments and clubs and children’s parties. I had to make the multitude of little decisions over how much to praise and how much to refuse and whose fault it was and who deserved what.

I would discuss Alex’s potty training with the mums in the playground and they’d lean in and sigh at the tragedy of what they’d heard through the toddler group gossip - such a selfless and contemporary father, utterly devoted to his sons. Didn’t they wish their husbands were more like me? Didn’t they flirt and flatter and press themselves against me when they laughed? Ruffling the boys’ hair as if to ask, “Wouldn’t you like me to be your new mother?”

I don’t know if I imagined this at the time or am making it up now. It doesn’t really matter. Paul eventually tails off his tirade and checks his watch, “Lunch in a bit. I wonder if it’s too late to call and tell them not to come today.”

I flick my fag end into the bushes behind me and stand in a slow, wonderfully unbalanced way. My voice looses itself from my throat, spontaneously, with a lump of phlegm that I spit between my slippers. I ought to smoke this stuff more often. I turn and press down on his knees with a hand and a stump so my face is too close to his for him to look at me comfortably. “Let them come,” I tell him. “Be honest. Tell them what you really think. What can they do?”

A twitching grin rips Paul’s face in two and he nods decisively. “I think I will. What can they do?”

I choke down a laugh and meander back to the conservatory, leaving him on the bench to hatch an ungrateful, callous old plan. And maybe I should make one too - tell them all to stop pretending they’re not thinking about how my madness is affecting and disturbing and inconveniencing them and ask them how the hell they think I feel about it.

#

I have been staring into space for hours, just breathing. Thinking about not breathing. I think I might have swallowed glass. There must be a very small person sitting on my cheekbones, pushing a sharp stick through the backs of my eyeballs.

I have been deposited in a line-up of comfortable chairs in the common room with the other cast-offs; an army of plastic soldiers made from a Quasimodo mould, stiff and frozen in a variety of unnatural positions. Backs are thrown up into humps by the tectonic plates of our twisted spines; arms wither to bone, loosely-wrapped in flaccid balloon-skin; faces grimace into pain, even when we’re smiling.

These are my peers, my contemporaries, and I hate them. We’ve lived too long, seen too many people die. There are a few here left with souls still intact, hideously jovial creatures who cajole and jolly the rest of us about. They like to check on whether we’ve had the latest round of tea, they pat our shoulders and call us ‘ducks’ and try to maintain their parenting instinct, cling to it to keep themselves real and useful and needed.

The rest of us are ‘confused’, unable to care for ourselves. We make dangerous decisions concerning the use of hobs and seasonal clothing. We speak our minds, except our minds are no longer our own. We sink into the quagmire of things that should already be dead while the young ones watch and pity and forget who we were.

A man in a suit jacket and tracksuit trousers sits across from me, head resting to one side against the wall, hands flickering in his lap. His fingers are so thin that if it weren’t for his swollen, arthritic knuckles, the wedding band on his left hand would have flown off long ago. It slides up and down with the undulation of his digits as they tap rhythmically on his thighs. I don’t know his name, but I know he used to make a living busking with his saxophone in the town centre. He lived in a caravan by the marina, paid no tax, no rent, made enough money each day to buy himself his daily bread.

After twenty years of living and playing day in and out, he falls asleep on his pitch - too cold, too slow to make it back to his caravan. He loses most of his toes to frostbite. They section him and find out he has a physiotherapist daughter who happily fronts his weekly rent for The Farm House. He breathes through pursed lips and I can hear a melody there, smell the rot inside him.

A woman called Frances used to sit where I am now, always the green corduroy chair with the silk tassels on the armrest. She made four attempts at escape before I arrived here. She succeeded, twice, but was brought back by staff or police, meek and quiet and thoroughly apologetic - didn’t know what had got into her, she said. She was dying before she got here - crippling headaches and a marching band inside her brain playing incessantly, just for her. A holy band of angels guiding her to heaven, she said. She’d been destined for incredible heights but had sacrificed it all for her sickly brother, who died and left her to raise his children. God wanted to reward her, and the marching band told her – or maybe she’d read it somewhere – that if she died in a royal place she’d be eligible for a state funeral; they’d pull out all the stops and the nation would wail for her, just like they did for Diana-lord-let-her-sleep-in-peace. So she took to loitering around the Palace of Westminster, sitting in a lobby chair listening to her auditory hallucinations play
The Saints Go Marching In
on an endless loop, waiting for the day she’d fall asleep forever and watch her good old send off from above. But it was not to be. She was escorted from the premises so many times that eventually social services investigated and found a nice lump sum sitting in her savings account that brought her here instead, where she died three weeks later, sitting in this same armchair watching
Loose Women
.

I gather my bones together and haul myself out of the chair, take a round trip through the circular corridor that leads around the whole ground floor - a never-ending journey for a happy little goldfish. I come to a natural halt at the foyer where an uncomfortable sofa, bookended by dusty plants, faces the receptionist’s desk. The Gatekeeper, Ingrid calls her. She frowns at me. I lower myself onto the seat opposite and stare blankly until she looks back down at her paperwork.

Her two bloodhounds languish under the desk at her feet - two more elderly gentlemen, bored out of their tiny brains, here until they die. Their eyelids droop low and their drool stretches to the floor. They smell atrocious but I have an overwhelming urge to join them on the carpet, to rest my head on their flanks, rising and falling so gently. To drape their ears over my hands and see life from a dog’s-eye-view.

The receptionist scowls. “It’s nearly lunch time, why don’t you head down to the dining room?” she barks, too loudly, jarring against my cushioned brain. It’s not a bad idea. I am, I realise suddenly, incredibly hungry. I hoist myself to standing and blunder over to her, dropping into an uncomfortable crouch before the dogs.