White Lies (23 page)

“You do what you can, Peter. If you made a mess of it, then you made a mess of it. Not much you can do about it now.”

“I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t do my best.”

“Then be a bloody man and blame yourself. God almighty, anyone would think you were the one dying.”

She plants her finger on the nurse-call button and yells, “Nurse!” at the top of her scratchy, worn out voice.

“Shhh,” I soothe.

“I,” she says, “have no regrets.”

I smile. “None?”

“Not a single one. They can bury me with glee and no looking back. If I see angels then they can applaud me as I go through the gates. If I see red devils they can feel my wrath. If there’s nothing, then I’ll just have a good old sleep. But there’s no point worrying about it, my love. Who says we have to achieve anything in our lives? Who says we have to find some epiphany? Who says we have to have a clean slate? We’re just little particles or something, bouncing around in bits of meat. Eh? Eh?”

Her eyes don’t say the same thing as her lips, but I nod, look away so she can wipe the moisture from her cheeks.

“Where’s that bloody nurse?”

#

When I was fifty-four, it was a very bad year. It was a very bad year for wives and mothers-in-law and lungs and cancerous cells and old worn out hearts, and I wondered how much death and loss a person could cope with before they no longer felt anything at all.

Alice went first - a ‘peaceful’ but fatal heart attack that a ticket officer discovered at the end of the line when he tried to wake her so they could clean the train. I sat the children around the dinner table and ruined their appetites. Angela cried into her chips. Alex didn’t speak for the rest of the day. Matt ran to his room and wedged a chair underneath the doorknob. She had been a grandmother to all of them. Both Lydia’s parents and mine were dead, but we never seemed to be able to get rid of Alice. The children cheerfully cast off her religious zeal and absorbed her generosity and her inability to give up on difficulty. They cried into each other’s shoulders at the funeral and grimaced under the attention of her weird old friends, who insisted on pinching their baby fat and clutching their faces with gnarled hands as if they were juicy peaches to be devoured.

We didn’t tell Lydia. She couldn’t bear Alice’s silent but obvious conviction that Heather would return one day and claim her usurped position as mother hen. But I knew what she would have said: that fate was toying with her, sending her nemesis to the afterlife to keep her company. I let her discover it in her own time, if there was such a thing as time after death. By that point she was flat out on liquid pain relief and a simple conversation exhausted her to the point of unconsciousness.

“I don’t want to go,” Lydia murmured, a week before she died. “But if it’s meant to be… ”

I disagreed. Not out loud, but I disagreed. It wasn’t meant to happen, not in my plan. I was meant to go first. None of it was meant to happen.

She’d always maintained that fate had played a part in crashing our cars. Some god, some destiny personified, looking down and bringing us together: two damaged hearts in need of one another. A sickening idea, I thought, and told her so, but she didn’t mind. No matter what I thought I never told her the whole truth: “No, sorry, you’re just a bad driver.”

No. It was the next bit that made me take her home and marry her before the pregnancy began to show. She’d said, “If it wasn’t for Angela I’d have killed myself by now. And if it wasn’t for you I’d still be wishing I’d never had Angela so I could kill myself.”

And that I understood. Given that sort of power, how could I walk away?

We gathered again at the dinner table, the day she died. The hospice nurses had known, they must become attuned to the approach of death, like feeling a presence in a room before you turn to see who’s there. The kids saw her go. Kissed her. Dropped tears on the bed sheets in little libations. Lydia didn’t have enough hands for us all to hold. Angela sacrificed hers for Matthew, and rested her palm on her mother’s forehead. I was left with her feet, which I clutched as gently as I could manage, clenching my jaws so hard my fillings throbbed.

It was nothing spectacular. She coughed a lot and the nurse adjusted her drip. There were no final words that any of us remembered afterwards - she wasn’t lucid that day, barely awake. Her eyes rolled around in pain beneath her eyelids and her lips were lined with white gunk.

We stood, frozen in a still life, until the nurse gently removed our hands so she could pull the sheets up to Lydia’s chin. I didn’t remember driving home. When I next blinked we were in front of the house and Angela leaned across my lap to turn off the ignition.

And so we congregated at the dinner table once more and Angela made a pot of tea and poured some squash for Alex.

“I’m sorry,” I told them.

No-one told me not to be.

Chapter Nineteen

A taxi takes me to the sushi restaurant, though I don’t remember asking it to. The driver found me sitting on a white exit arrow in the underground hospital car park wearing a pair of borrowed tracksuit bottoms from the lost and found. They’re too tight and there’s some sort of greasy residue inside the pockets and I don’t want to know who they used to belong to.

It took me twenty minutes to find a side door out of the maze of the hospital and into an endless series of concrete stairs that led me round and round the car park. I limped up three ramps before my injured leg gave way and my palms slapped down onto damp asphalt, leaving me squeaking out breathless swearwords.

A car revved up the ramp behind me and beeped its fury at my obstruction. I crawled out the way and it swept past me, angry middle fingers bashing against the passenger window.

And then I’m sitting at a conveyor belt with pickled ginger on my tongue and I don’t know how many hours I’ve lost. I try to focus on one particular orange bowl as it revolves around the bar but my headache intensifies the harder I concentrate.

There was a phone call, back in the car park, echoing round the concrete bunker, and Sabine’s voice: “You sound like you’re in a church.”

I didn’t tell her where I was. I asked her why she left and if she was coming back and I don’t know what she said but it wasn’t good. She said she was sorry. She’d been thinking about it for a while. Leaving me.

Then the beeping and the roaring of a passing car and the warmth of the taxi’s fake leather seats and a friendly waitress and sticky rice.

Two teenage girls sit a few stools away to my left. They look about fourteen. One of them is hitting puberty with all cylinders firing, or maybe it’s hitting her. Her breasts have been siphoned into an ill-fitting bra and strange bulges protrude out the top and sides of it. The other girl is the same shape as a skinny, awkward boy – like Alex at about that age – all shoulder blades and elbows that need to be tucked into the body to stop them randomly flailing around and taking someone’s eye out. I can’t see her legs under the table but I know they will be long and brittle and angular. Her skinniness makes me laugh for some reason and I snigger into my plate of noodles, pasting spinach to my chin. The girls stare in disgust.

I think I’m going to throw up. The girls glare, the waitress’ smile slips from her mouth, the chef slices squid tentacles. I gag into the sleeve of my coat and limp to the bathroom before my head explodes and wriggling curls of brain and matted hair splatter against the front window.

#

Clare is shouting at me again. And my alarm won’t shut off. One or the other. Or both. No. My phone is ringing, and then it’s not, and that’s when the shouting starts.

“Where the fuck are you? Sarah’s here.”

I tell her how I got hit by a bus when I wasn’t wearing underwear and then I can’t stop laughing.

Wait. Sarah’s here? I was supposed to cook her dinner and now I’m full of sushi and lying on the floor of a toilet stall. Bollocks.

Clare calls Jamie a dick and a twat and worse when she hears what he did. He should be scared. I am. She says she’s going to find a way to get me home.

Someone knocks on the door. If it’s Alex he can fuck right off.

“Excuse me, Sir? Are you okay?”

I didn’t lock the door - the polite someone pushes it open and it smacks me in the head. The waitress looks down at me with equal parts concern and trepidation.

“Do you know where I am?” I ask her. Clare is demanding to know. I pass the waitress the phone and close my eyes for just a second.

#

“Don’t go to sleep, Matt.”

“I’m not.”

“Maybe we should stop for some caffeine.”

“No, no, I’m fine.”

I’m bullshitting, talking in my sleep while I mash pieces of logic and splintered memory together. The hum of my stupid little car’s engine struggling to hit sixty-five on the motorway. The whooshing of the heater and the rumble of a passing lorry. Sabine’s vanilla perfume. Murmured curses at the sticky fifth gear. Pain in my head and my hip. Soft, old, folded letters.

I can still taste wasabi. I wonder if Sabine can too. I wasn’t expecting her. I wasn’t expecting the kiss as she clicked my seatbelt in place. Maybe she hadn’t meant to do it but I was in no position to stop her and it was really no effort to press my lips against hers when she leaned across.

#

The motorway ends and we segue onto a minor road. Streetlights stream past us into the night. She turns the radio up too loud when she runs out of stimulating conversation to keep me awake. Clouds full of rain lie ahead – bands of grey over plump white, legless sheep – a formation in the middle that looks unnervingly like a human ear. Some god is listening. We stop at a set of lights, its lampposts dressed up in bouquets, old and fresh, rain-soaked notes, cellophane flapping in the wind. I should tape flowers over the hole in my living room wall. It’s the done thing.

My stitches keep me sober and aching. I yawn and shift and grumble. Sabine sighs. Guilt and gratitude flood through me. “Thank you,” I tell her. And, “I’m so sorry.” It pains me to say it out loud, but: “I miss you.”

She shrugs. “You’re going through some shit,” she says.

#

I try to kiss her again when she drops me off but she holds my shoulders still and pushes me backwards until I’m inside my flat and she is the other side of the doorway.

“Not now,” she says. She passes over my car keys and shuts the door between us.

Clare is asleep on the sofa. She stirs when I put the kettle on and flaps around me with apologies and swearing insults about what kind of idiot gets hit by a bus. She’s been crying, at least.

“Why Sabine?” I ask her.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know who else to call.”

Humiliation that I should have felt a few hours ago saunters in and settles itself down in my stomach. “I bet she was fucking thrilled to come and rescue her damsel in distress… ”

Clare twists her face into my eyeline, forces me to look at her. “She wasn’t pissed off, Matt. She was worried. As soon as I told her what happened, she said she’d go.” She gets no reaction from me. I don’t believe her. We watch the kettle come to a boil, shuddering on its base.

“What did you do?” Clare asks. “Why did you break up?”

The kettle’s switch pings. Steam douses my face with moisture and my blood pressure drops through the floor. I grip onto the worktop and Clare puts out a hand to steady me.

“What did
I
do?” I snap. “I don’t fucking know. Because I’m a bastard. We all are. Every one of us. Don’t you know that yet?”

I have out-teenagered her. Her eyes brim. Fuck.

“Yes, you are,” she says, a sneer offsetting the tears. “All of you. Bastards and selfish idiots.”

“Selfish. Yeah. Not like you, hitching a free ride, ignoring your mum when she’s worrying herself fucking sick about you, and my dad, and everyone else, like she always does.” Clare tries to cut in but I slap the counter with both palms. “Your mum’s brother just died, Clare. Don’t you think we all might be trying to deal with something other than you right now?”

She sags: a hunched little girl in her pyjamas in my kitchen. The clock on the microwave says three-oh-nine.

“Go to bed,” I tell her. “I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

She doesn’t argue but she stops at the bedroom doorway and stares back at me, her eyes flashing with water. “You know, guilt isn’t the same as grief, Matt.”

It would have been less painful if she’d slammed the door, but it closes with a soft squeal and all that’s left is the grumbling of the cooling kettle.

And I am here, not sleeping, drinking coffee and watching documentaries about fishing in the North Sea, until the birds start freaking out about the dawn and the rising sunlight turns the hole in my living room wall into a grimacing mouth.

Chapter Twenty