White Lies (24 page)

“You are in so much trouble,” Angela hisses, eyes as sharp as open razor blades, ire held back behind her tongue and clamped-shut teeth. I can see the shape of her skull beneath her taut, angry skin. I don’t know what she means but I am intrigued. She pauses at the threshold of my room before stamping two steps inside and closing the door behind her.

“I had to have a disciplinary meeting with my manager. I have a
warning
on my file, Peter.” She flags a bit. The muscles in her buttocks relax and her whole frame drops a few inches. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

I try. I do. If I could manage it, I’d even attempt to choose my words tactfully, although there is no real way to ask what she’s talking about without sounding trite. I shrug instead and stare at my slippers.

She deflates entirely, dropping onto the arm of my chair with a half-groan, half-sigh.

“Do you remember what you did?”

I shake my head.

She pats me gently on the shoulder. I wince as a streak of pain darts down to my wrist. She catches her breath. “I’m sorry. Are you in pain? When did you last have your painkillers?”

I adjust my arm further into my sling like a bird with a damaged wing and flip up a grin in the hope it will make her go away. She and Alma are in cahoots. I know that now. Pills full of poison. A slow, vengeful death.

She grimaces, as if she can draw out my lies with her twisted lips and squinting eyes. “Paul is fine, by the way. In case you care.”

I nod. That sounds like a good thing, whoever Paul is.

She shakes her head. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have - I saw you, Peter, talking to that kitchen porter. I was going to report him but he said it might help with the pain. Might… calm you down a bit.” She leans in and rests her hands on my knees. “Where did you put it, Peter? If they find it… Please, try to remember.”

My shoulders are so used to shrugging I wonder if eventually they’ll get stuck up by my ears. I can’t help her. I don’t even know what’s been lost. Angela picks at the loose loops of thread in the arm of the chair and I need to say something to lift her sadness but I don’t have any worthwhile words. The sun flashes against the wall, reflecting off a car window as it pulls into the car park. For a second the light filters through her hair and I remember:

“Clare was here.”

Angela looks up in confusion. “Last night?”

“Where were you?” I ask. Clare was terrified. I was no help. She needed her mother. “She needed you,” I snarl. Regret it immediately. Grasp at her hands in apology.

Angela tries to smile to show it isn’t my fault. She blames the strokes, the broken pieces of my psyche, the grumpy old man who has taken possession of my skin. I want her to break, to hate me like the others do, but she knows what I know. She knows what I can’t tell Matthew and she still won’t desert me.

She takes a long breath in. We blink at each other. She pats my shoulder again and I forget to wince. Then there’s a barking gulp from her throat and her shoulders shake as she weeps into her hands.

#

“Alice?”

“It’s Lauren.”

“Alice?”

“My name’s Lauren, Peter, you know that.”

“Alice?”

A sharp exhalation, halfway to furious, halfway from frustrated. “Whatever,” Alice says under her breath.

My eyes can’t focus on her; she merely lingers like the ghost of mothers-in-law past by my left shoulder. My right arm is in the hands of another woman, a hospital nurse. She manipulates each finger in turn, flexes and stretches my wrist until it clicks. I turn a whelp of pain into a cough. My sawn-off cast lies disembowelled on the bed next to me. I stroke the strands of gauze that poke out of its belly. Weeks since my last stroke, though I don’t remember how I came to fall, and I cannot work out why Alice would be here with me to have my cast removed. She must be at least a hundred by now. The nurse won’t let go of my arm and I can’t twist around to look at the woman behind me to check who is there. All I can see is her hand impatiently tapping the metal side bar of the bed. It doesn’t look like a hundred-year-old hand. It has a silver wedding band and an engagement ring with too many diamonds that I’ve never seen on Alice before. Did she remarry while I was in the home?

Of course not, her name is Lauren and she’s not Heather’s mother. But that doesn’t stop me asking, “Did you get married again?”

She replies with a petulant and confused, “No.”

It isn’t Alice’s voice either. That proves it. I wonder where Alice is, I could have sworn she was here earlier.

The hospital nurse doesn’t speak to me, converses only with someone over my spotted, balding head about physiotherapy and rehabilitation exercises, about monitoring movement and restricted weight-bearing.

Someone has written all over my discarded plaster cast, the same three words in tiny scrawls that I can barely read.
Alex is dead,
it says. I think it might be my handwriting but it doesn’t make any sense. The letters switch places with each other, mutating and stretching as I watch them:
Alex’s head. Alex said. All is ended.

The nurse gives me a squash ball to squeeze, until the muscles in my forearm contract and scream lactic acid into my bloodstream. Lauren drives me back to the home, switches the radio up to a volume that causes the hairs on the inside of my ears to vibrate.

Alice peers at me in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes are distrustful, irritated and full of tiredness. A phone rings somewhere upon her person. As we stop at a crossroads she peeks at the screen and taps a reply.

“Who was that?” I ask, suddenly aware of the deception in her seated stance.

“Pardon?”

“On the phone, was that her?”

“Who? It’s none of your business, Peter.”

“You know exactly who I mean, Alice.”

“Oh God… I’m not whoever Alice is. That was my son, asking for a lift home from school later, if you must know.”

“You lied through your teeth to me, to Matthew, to all of us,” I say in a low quiet tone. She shifts in the driver’s seat, flicking the indicator with an angry hand, pulling out into a too-small gap and getting beeped as she cuts up a taxi. She knows I know. But she doesn’t know about the letters.

“Peter, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I’d appreciate it if you stopped raising your voice at me. We’ll be back at the home in a minute.”

“You knew she was still alive, you never stopped believing. Well, more fool you.”

She sits silent, staring ahead at an empty country road as intently as if she were trying to cross four lanes of traffic. Her left foot taps distractedly against the floor mat.

“I knew she never told you, or you wouldn’t have been able to keep it a secret. For all your holier-than-thou preaching that we had to keep the faith, she never visited you, did she? Did she?”

“Peter - ”

“And now she really is gone, so you can stop holding out for a miracle return, because you’re not going to get it. She’s at the bottom of the ocean.” I can feel a wild grin on my face that disgusts me but protects me from the agony that should be in its place.

There is a long, shuddering pause from her, then: “Peter, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I need her to know, to stop believing. I need her to give up, along with me. It’s laughable. So I laugh. Lazy, like Ingrid: ha aha, ha.

“She jumped,” I tell Alice. “At high tide.” She wasn’t a swimmer. She called me from the clifftop, from a phone box plastered with numbers for the Samaritans, a box for people just like her. I didn’t pick up. All I got was an answerphone message.

Alice blinks like an epileptic doll as we pull into the car park. She sits and breathes in long whistles, hands still on the wheel, shoulders shivering. I roll a cigarette, heave the door open and painstakingly pull myself out of the car. She doesn’t move to help me. She can sit and rot there, she’s dead after all, been dead a long time. I can’t believe I forgot about that.

#

When I was forty-two, it was not a very good year. It was a grey year. Matthew, you were two. Your mother was gone, but not quite gone. Nana Alice posted photos of you through the letter box when I refused to answer the door, until they covered the doormat completely. I started leaving and entering the house through the back door. When I had to pick up the post I’d do so with my eyes closed, feeling blindly across the bristles until my fingertips met matte envelope rather than the gloss of a photograph. She tried to fool me by putting them in envelopes, got her friends to write the address so I wouldn’t know they were from her. But I knew. I frisbeed them back onto the doormat, unopened.

A drunken night-spirit, born of several bottles of wine, dared me into action. I swept the pictures up into a rubbish bag with the broom at arm’s length, doused them with lighter fluid and left them flaming on that bastard’s doorstep. I ran barefoot back to the house, grinding gravel into the soles of my feet, skinning my knee in an elaborate skid as I rounded the corner of my drive.

The wine-spirit was gone when I was safe inside and the lonely terror grasped me by the scruff of my neck. I poured Dettol on my wounds and hissed at the almost full moon. A few days more and I would have made the transition into a beast.

She came in the back, used the spare key that hung behind the birdfeeder. She sat like a Bond villain in darkness, awaiting my return from work, rehearsing her grand reveal.

“Peter,” she whispered.

I swore and my heart sucker-punched me in the chest. Heather sat on a kitchen chair, a shaft of moonlight falling in curved lines across her quivering hands which lay on the worktop, quivering.

She’d lost weight. She’d lost the weight of a whole baby and all that went with it. And more. The weight of responsibility and worry and stress and love. Her face was pale and longer than I remembered. Eyes reddened from saltwater rubbed angrily away. She didn’t want to cry. She didn’t want pity to state her case. She was holding it in with the last of her strength.

I felt less than I thought I would. “He’s not here,” I told her.

“I know. I’ve seen him.”

“You saw your mother?”

She shook her head, swallowing hard and painful. “I saw him in the garden. He was singing Frère Jacques to the rabbit.”

I nodded but couldn’t move any closer to her, so strong was the scent that had slowly faded from her left-behind clothes, her pillow, the towel she’d used the night she went into labour. I remembered in a rush of blood all the ways in which I used to hold her; the soft resistance of her skin, the angle of her head against my shoulder, her hot breath leaving condensation on my cheek. Eyelids, lips, tongue, neck, nipples, stomach, hips, buttocks, calves, big toe. Even if she gave them all to me, they no longer belonged. I’d lost her the moment she gave up Matty. I thought that if she smiled she might break me into pieces.

“You got my letters?” she said.

I nodded again. I’d tried to burn them too, on a bonfire at the end of the garden, but my hands wouldn’t let go. My fingers disobeyed and stuffed the envelopes into my coat pockets where they sat for months. I had to buy a new coat to avoid contact with them. At last the earth moved around and spring came. I packed away the loaded garment into the top of the wardrobe, out of sight until the following autumn when I somehow found the strength to seal them into a shoebox.

She breathed in bubbles of excess saliva produced by her determination not to cry - countless intakes but no words in exchange. We were almost motionless there together. In three or four strides I could have crossed the vast distance between us, grabbed her by the shoulders and manhandled her into the cupboard under the stairs. I could have kept her in there, fed and watered and safe. I could have dragged the spare room mattress in as well, to make it comfortable for her. I would have slept in the hall. We could have talked through the gap under the door. We would have been close again. We wouldn’t have ever had to answer the door.

Her eyes turned dry and enraged, glowering at her bitten-raw fingernails, snapping up to pin me to the wall.

“You would have been happy never to try again. You said: Maybe. It. Just. Wasn’t. Meant. To. Be.”

“It’s my fault?” The words were snatched off my tongue before I could chew them up.

She faltered, rolled her head from side to side, “No. No… I’m sorry, Peter. I’m so sorry.”

“Are you coming back?”

“No.”

“You don’t want me.” Not a question.

She didn’t reply.

“You don’t want your son.” Not a question.

No reply.

“Do you want - ” I can’t say his name, “ - Him?”

“No. No!”

“What are you going to do?”

“What’s left?”

And that was the point at which I should have gathered her up into my arms and kissed her, stroked her hair behind her ears, pressed her against my chest and held her tight and all those clichés that mean nothing when you’ve been carved out and left echoing. She’d shrunk into someone I didn’t know, perched miserably on her chair like a pigeon in the pouring rain. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her. It wasn’t that I didn’t want her to stay. It wasn’t that I wanted her dead. I don’t know what it was. Pride, perhaps? Stubbornness. Lydia’s idea of fate, come to punish me? So I did nothing. Said nothing. I might have even nodded, validating the unspoken implication. It was my fault.

“Why are you here?” I asked her.

She rounded her shoulders and her bottom lip curled down over itself in a grin which possessed no joy at all. Her eyes squinted into lines and out came the tears. Still, she tried to prevent them, gritting her teeth so her voice came through the gaps in a squeak, “I don’t know.”

I turned around and ripped off a few sheets of kitchen roll, tossing them onto the counter in front of her. “Thank you,” she whispered.

I sat down opposite her. “You didn’t have to tell me,” I said softly.

“I know.”

“You could have pretended.”

“I know.”

“I would have loved him anyway.”

She looked up and the resolution behind her eyes terrified me. “I wouldn’t have,” she said. “I can’t.”

She left again and I didn’t stop her. I didn’t watch her disappear down the road. She might never have been there at all but for the crumpled up kitchen paper that had blown onto the floor with the breeze of the front door closing.