White Lies (28 page)

“Are you deaf? I want Gloria!”

“Please don’t shout, Peter.”

“I’ll shout if I bloody well want to.” I straighten up and my head meets the overhanging corner of the chest of drawers. The nurses hiss in a communal wincing breath. The porter takes a step forward but I sweep my hand through the photographs like kicking up autumn leaves and a flurry of pictures rains down between us. Alice and Matthew sitting on a pair of swings. Lydia heavily pregnant, shading her eyes from the sun. Angela sitting on my lap, pretending to drive the car. Alex swaddled up tight in a Moses basket. My eyes are full of water. “Gloria can talk to the dead,” I tell his image. “She talked to you.”

The staff exchange glances. “Peter, let us tidy all this up,” a nurse says softly. The porter pulls the Christmas hat from his head and picks at the white woolly bobble.

Alex and Matthew made up a game: goldfish in a bowl. They’d flap their fins and run circles round the living room, chanting, “One, two, three, blip!” changing direction as their memories reset. They’d feign interest in a piece of furniture, a pattern on the carpet, a juice cup, then lose their minds after a count of three and see the world anew again.

I close my eyes and count to three but the memory doesn’t disappear. The porter pulls me to my feet and rests me down in the armchair. One of the nurses stacks the photographs into a box. My knees are scuffed and sore from the carpet, my wrist throbs but is not bleeding. It was never bleeding. The blotches of blood I’d seen soaking into the carpet are gone. I pull back my sleeve to find my stump as it always was: pinched and sealed, slightly pinker than the rest of my arm. But I can still smell the iron tinge of blood, feel the slick greasiness on my skin, the deep ache where canine teeth tore through flesh.

I spread my remaining hand flat on my knee, palm facing upwards. Gloria said no two hands are the same, that the lines differ from left to right. The dominant takes on life’s genuine path while the other shows the potential you are born with. I am left with the left, full of hypotheticals. Lifeline: longer than I desired, fragmented along its entirety. Loveline: forking and curved, intersecting the lifeline at its tip. Feather-light lines on the side of my hand beneath the little finger: three little lives I inherited as my own.

I can hear the nurses discussing me in low tones, wisps of whispers that fall into my ears. They think my off switch has been flicked. “God, it’s heartbreaking, really.”

“Why doesn’t Angela tell him?”

“She has, he doesn’t remember.”

“She should tell him the truth.”

“Would you? Again and again?”

“I just can’t believe he doesn’t know.”

It is as if I am lying in the wreck of a car, listening to the battered radio spew out travel reports about how my twisted body is holding up the evening commute by so many miles of gridlocked traffic. I am paralysed by the sight of my hand. How much would the other have diverged in the mapping of my existence? What might have been and what was. What does a missing hand signify? What else am I missing? I swallow down thick mucus with a thud and realise it’s the other way around: what did I never have in the first place?

Chapter Twenty-Five

Third beer. Concussion is winning. Graham is skinny and shrunken and unfamiliar. He watches me across the kitchen worktop until I break the anti-social spell. “My brother died,” I say. I can say it now, without feeling like I’ve been kicked in the nuts.

He nods. “I heard. I’m so sorry.”

Graham’s kitchen is a mirror image of how ours used to be, back to front, but the same orange-lacquer on the cabinet fronts, the same fake marble lino. Memories of my childhood home slide into place, overlaid with someone else’s possessions. “My brother died.” This time it makes me cry. I’ve cried more this afternoon than I’ve done since I was a whining nine-year-old being bullied by my five-year-old brother.

Graham pats the worktop in a gentle rhythm and it’s strangely soothing. When it becomes evident I’m not going to stop sniffling he turns to stuff a new liner into the bin and washes his hands, slow and thorough, staring out into the darkness of the garden. He’s probably a decade younger than my dad, but looks as if he would snap if you high-fived him. He takes down a couple of tumblers from a cupboard and polishes them with a tea towel before clinking them together and nodding at the beer.

“Enough left for a toast?” he says.

I scrub my wet face on my wet sleeve. “What for?”

He shrugs. “To Alex.”

I slide the remaining cans over the counter. Let’s be civilised about this. Why the fuck not?

Graham sips the cheap beer, grimaces, and puts his glass down purposefully. “I heard about Peter.” Then: “Your dad,” like I wouldn’t know who he meant.

“What about him?”

“That he’s losing it.”

I nod. That’s about it.

We drink. It’s comfortably uncomfortable, somehow. There are no questions of what I am doing with my life, about Angela or Clare or any details of my brother’s death or why I had been standing outside his house. He wipes away something invisible on the counter and exhales more air than could possibly be in his lungs with one long whistling stream.

“Peter did the same as you a few years ago,” he gestured to my left, to the front door. “Staring up at his old house, drinking on the curb. I didn’t invite him in though.” Graham shakes his head as if he’s forgotten what he meant to say. “I should have moved. I should have left. But… ” he swept his arms loosely around the dark kitchen. “This is home.”

I don’t know what he means. Was living next to us so awful? “Dad wasn’t a very good neighbour,” I try a smile. “Don’t take it personally. He hates everyone.” But that’s not quite true. He reserved a special flavour of loathing for some people. The first time I heard Dad swear was about Graham. “That bastard next door.” It became an epithet - forged so long before my comprehension that I never really questioned it, though it seemed at odds with how Graham was to me and the other kids. He’d looked after us a few times after Lydia went into hospital. He had no children of his own but he brought a box of Lego and an Atari down from the attic and we gawped and punched the air with hissing yeses before ignoring him completely for the rest of the evening. Contended and ungrateful. He tried to send us home with the toys but my Dad left them on his doorstep and muttered about pity and charity and not accepting anything from that bastard next door.

“He had his reasons to be angry,” Graham says. I don’t get it. The alcohol flares up some suppressed ember of hatred and I can’t stop shaking my head. My dad has been a monolith of fear and resentment and uncertainty my whole life and I haven’t stopped trying to gain his approval even though it should mean nothing. He doesn’t deserve to approve of me.

“Why should he be allowed to be such an arsehole when we all have to try to be decent people? Why is he the exception?” I go to pour out the rest of my can but it’s empty. Graham slides his glass into my hand.

“I thought maybe he’d died when I saw you out there,” he mutters. Chance would be a fine fucking thing. The words settle behind my tongue, unsaid, but I fail to feel any guilt. Instead I say, “Not yet.”

“Did you ever…?” Graham stops, falters, twists his face around the question and finishes with a grimace. “Ever hear from your mother? Ever find out what happened to her?”

The question is a slap on drunken cheeks. “No.” But Dad did. My voice resolves into an edge. “Why?”

Graham tries not to look at me but can’t help taking little nibbling glances while he waits for me to stop staring threateningly back. “I just wondered. It was all just so sad,” he says. There are no tears from him but I can tell they’re there, behind puckered old eyelids and circular glasses and I can’t tell why my mum’s disappearance can still make him want to cry, when all I have is fury.

“You knew her, you tell me why she left,” I hear myself say - words I’ve wanted to scream in my father’s face, a question I’ve not asked since I was a child.

Graham bares his teeth in an odd, restrained expression - holding back, holding in, holding onto something. “Your father knows, I’m sure.”

“You think? He can’t even remember that Alex is dead.”

“Matthew. I’m almost as old as he is and there are plenty of things I’ve forgotten. Your mother - she’s not one of them. Your father can’t have forgotten either.”

I was wrong, he looks older than my dad. Sadder. Sorrier. Knocked down and reversed over again. I down the rest of my drink. He smiles a pathetic smile at me and I feel like I owe him something. “She sent him letters,” I say, and his eyes snap up to drill into mine.

“What did you say?” he whispers.

“I found a stack of them, in Dad’s room.” Before he asks the inevitable, I tell him: “I don’t know what they said. But it means he’s lied to me my whole fucking life.”

There is water in his eyes now. His chin trembles and saliva stretches between his lips as he lets out a strangled sort of cry. He reaches across the counter to hold my hands and his skin is warmer than I think it’s going to be. Not a zombie. Softer. Infinitely more human in the last few minutes than my Dad has been in years.

“Matthew, I’m sorry,” he says, taking two steps around the counter and sliding his arms around my neck. “I’m so sorry.” He pulls me into his chest with more strength than he should possess, and he is crying the way I should be able to about Alex. About my mother. About my dying, demented dad. I hug him back and he smells like all the things that were lost when Dad moved into the home.

#

I am as drunk as I am tired and I shouldn’t be driving. I take the backstreets, stay below twenty and lean into the windscreen as though it might help my eyes to focus. There is a plastic bag on the passenger seat that makes me cry every time it catches my peripheral vision. Inside the bag is a collection of envelopes. Inside the envelopes are pictures. And inside the photos are images of me as a baby, as a toddler, as a preschooler. All the ones missing from Dad’s albums. Ones he threw away. Tried to burn. Pictures Graham found on the street, apparently, and squirrelled away in place of a family of his own. He pressed the bag into my chest when I left.

“I meant to write to you when you moved out,” he said quietly, as if worried that my Dad would still be able to hear him. “I thought you might want them.” He didn’t finish his thought – explain why he never followed through – and I didn’t ask.

#

I have thirty-six missed calls. For about a mile I was convinced the car was going to explode until I realised it wasn’t the engine rattling but an angry phone locked in a glovebox. Clare, Sarah, Angela, Sabine, the nursing home and round and round again, backed up with answerphone messages that I don’t listen to and texts that I don’t look at.

If the drive sobered me at all, the cold walk to my flat sends a fresh flow of heaviness into my blood. I need to sleep and forget everything.

A couple stand arguing outside the entrance to my block of flats but instead of ignoring me and carrying on as I weave around the corner, they both stop mid-sentence and take an aggressively synchronised step towards me. It’s fine, they can mug me, beat me, whatever. I don’t care anymore.

“Matt?” the man says.

“Where have you been?” the woman says.

I know their voices, I don’t need to look out from under my hood to see their faces.

“Fuck off,” I reply.

Sabine shoves her palms into my shoulders. “Matt, where the fuck have you been?”

“We’ve been trying to call,” Jamie says. He doesn’t shove me but his stance tells me he wants to.

“Fuck. Off.”

I try to push past them to the stairs but Sabine pulls at my coat and Jamie blocks my way. “Have you heard from Clare?” Sabine asks.

“She’s not answering her phone either,” Jamie says.

“Matt?”

“Have you seen her?”

“Not since this morning,” I say, watching them both shrink a few inches. My hands are still in my pockets and my fingers close around my phone in reflexive memory. “She’s been calling me though… ”

“For fuck’s sake, Matt!” Jamie’s voice is hoarse and I can’t collate the reasons for urgency together with my soft, diluted brain.

“Call her back,” Sabine demands.

“Why do you care where my niece is?” I ask them both, emphasising the possession.

Jamie sort of collapses forwards with his elbows against the wall, his hands clawing at his face. “She came over to mine this morning and we had a fight. She left and now she won’t answer her phone.”

“She fucking
what
?”

He avoids my eyes but I grab one of his hands and tear it away from his face. “Why was Clare at yours?”

Sabine pries the phone from my fist and presses redial on Clare’s number.

Jamie doesn’t reply but I still have him by the wrist and I smack him in the forehead with his own hand like we’re at school again, chanting:
stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself
. “What the fuck is going on with you two?”

He sort of growls. I make him hit himself again. A few more times. He hunches back against the wall and for the first time in our lives I am the fucking alpha, but instead of feeling satisfied I am just exhausted.