White Lies (29 page)

Sabine pokes the screen of my phone angrily. “She’s not picking up.”

Jamie’s hand isn’t hitting hard enough. I lift my free fist and he slides down a few inches. “It’s mine,” he says. “The baby’s mine.”

Sabine’s mouth freezes half open.

“Jesus,” I say. “That’s just fucking perfect.”

“She’s nineteen!” Sabine shouts at him, then turns on me, gesturing viciously with my phone, “Did you know she was pregnant?”

I nod. Jamie gives me a loathing look. I send him one back. “I’ve been looking after her. What the fuck have you been doing? Punching random old men in the face. Getting teenagers pregnant. What the
fuck
, Jamie? When did it happen?”

He rubs at his forehead, readjusts his hair absent-mindedly. “I was starting my PhD. She was in her second year. It wasn’t a one-off,” he says quietly, then remembers to glare at me. “She didn’t want to tell you because you hate me.”

“Yeah, I do,” It’s too late for guilt trips. “What did you fight about? Where did she go?”

He returns to the face clawing. “I said I was going to tell her mum about it. She went mental at me and stormed out. You need to get hold of her, see if she’s okay. Please?”

Sabine strides towards me and thrusts my phone into my stomach and I enjoy Jamie’s flinch as she passes him. “Listen to your messages,” she says.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Whistler died today. I watched her fold in two from across the hall. For once the machines didn’t beep.

Something has sprung a leak. Water seeps beneath my closed door with a head of dirty foam. The bubbles burst lazily as they reach the foot of my armchair, leaving white scum across my toes. Every so often the shingle turns over an empty mussel shell, a tiny crab fighting its way to the surface of the carpet, a faded old crisp packet. Outside my window, seagulls fight over scraps, beaks tipped with red, eyes wild and piercing.

She knocks on my door and I nod my acquiescence. She waits for the seventh wave to build, the largest in the pattern, before she gently pushes her way in. The water soaks me up to my knees and trickles down between my legs to pool in my crotch. A flurry of seaweed rushes in behind her – the kind made of smooth rubbery pustules with fronds like a Celtic tattoo – and it settles itself in eye-watering complexity on top of the already over-designed carpet.

“Morning, lover,” Heather says. Her mouth is full of sand. She’s never spoken to me like that before. I nod again. She’s beautiful. I must have forgotten quite how beautiful she always was. She hears my thoughts and smiles, grit stuck between her teeth.

“I miss you,” is my counter-offer.

“No, you don’t,” she says, laughing, but not amused, “you’re confused.”

A nurse passes my doorway but doesn’t glance in. The taint of sewage hangs in the air; a pipe set too near the shore. I used to let the kids swim here.

“I still have your letters,” I tell her, hoping they’re safe from the seawater in their shoebox under the bed.

“Burn them,” Heather says. She is the deity of wrath and I am afraid. “I don’t want Matthew to see them.”

“I’ve kept enough from him.”

“They’re dangerous, Peter. A letter killed your other son.”

The wind picks up and the spray becomes tiny splinters of glass, flying sideways, embedding themselves deep into my skin. She takes a step forward. Seaweed capsules pop under her feet.

“Burn them,” she orders.

“You blame me, don’t you?” I say, and can’t keep the aggression out of my voice, can’t help the injustice making me turn a plum purple, holding my breath like a petulant child until she answers.

“You don’t think I should?”

I splutter, spitting out empty exclamations of “Puh! Puh! Buh!” until I feel a rubber band snap in my head. Snowstorm static invades my vision and my face begins to melt.

Heather’s vein-riddled hands reach up to her frozen, eternal face. Her skin has turned translucent from the fluid beneath. She blinks once, twice, then takes out her eyes – pops them clean out of their sockets – and holds out her hand to me. They lie moist and shining in her palm and I forget how to breathe and a seventh stroke runs its way down the right side of my body and urine runs down my right leg.

She leans forward and places her eyeballs in my hand.

“Try seeing things from my perspective,” she says.

#

My brain starts shutting doors, closing up for the night -switching off appliances and lights and rolling down the shutters. My body shivers like a furious Jack Russell.

Heather sees her demand through. She sits on the bed and rolls me cigarette after cigarette using the browning letters she sent me thirty-something years ago. They burn faster than Rizla, taste like dirt and coal fires, make my eyes water until I can’t tell if I’m weeping or bleeding. Her eyeballs rest in my lap, watching me smoke away the proof. I run out of tobacco the letter before last, toking down the word ‘Heather’ in one painful breath. And then she is gone.

I cough until I vomit - bloody and thick with mucus. I stumble through the seaweed to shut the door behind her, to seal the doorway for good, sobbing into the little plastic sign that tells me where to find my nearest fire exit. There is salt on my fingertips, grimy tidelines on the furniture, but the water has disappeared.

There’s something in my pocket, in my fist. My palm spasms open and I feel paper wrinkle itself outwards again, like a time-lapse flower in bloom. I smooth out the final letter, tracing the indents of her pen, the confession I wished she’d never posted.

Through the door I can hear the nurses clattering around Mother Whistler as they disconnect her robot counterparts and I have to force myself not to charge out and stop them, from gathering the old skeleton up in my arms and singing her a lullaby. Poor Whistler. Poor Ingrid. Poor Alex.

The shoebox sits on the bed, malicious and innocuous. I’m certain I didn’t put it there. It’s only three paces away – only two medium steps to reach my little box of palpitations – but it takes at least twenty to get there. The shoebox is empty of paper but full of tablets.

The letter in my pocket is the last test. It holds all the answers to Matthew’s incessant questions and Angela’s do-gooder prodding and Alice’s chirpy Christian mourning. The anger I’ve tended to all these years flames into guilt and tastes like chalk on my dry tongue.

I unfold the soft paper. Age has turned it to the texture of brushed cotton. I read the lines one more time and tear it into eight neat pieces along the well-folded edges. It dissolves in my mouth like sugar-paper. The pulp soothes my scorched throat as it goes down, pushing the lump of grief along with it. I manipulate Heather’s eyeballs in my palm like Chinese meditation balls.

When I have swallowed down her dirty little secret I reach for the shoebox and its jumble of pills, to take my headache and my hallucinations and the stickiness of my palms far away.

Three will do it. I carry the box to the bathroom and drink from the tap until my stomach swells. I drop the eyeballs down the toilet but they refuse to flush. The pills in my hand are gone too, though I don’t remember taking them. Never mind, there are plenty more.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Message one. Angela: “Matt, why didn’t you wait for me at work this morning? I really need to talk to you about your dad. Did you find anything in his room? Call me back.”

Message four. Clare: “You’re absolutely right you’re all bastards, you stupid bastard.”

Message nine. Sabine: “I’m at your flat but I don’t have a key anymore. Are you here? Are you ignoring me? Fucking hell, Matt.”

Message sixteen. The Farm House: “Mr Landrow, we’re calling about your father. Angela says she’s been trying to get hold of you too but if you get this message please call the main number on - ”

Message twenty-one. Clare crying.

Message twenty-five. Angela crying.

Message thirty-two. Jamie: “Matty. Please.”

Message thirty-four. Angela: “Matthew. Sabine just called me about Clare, what the hell is going on? Matt, please, please, answer your phone.”

Clare’s number goes straight to answerphone, no matter how many times I yell at it.

My mobile slides up and down my lap on speakerphone as I drive into the rain and through the university campus, back to Angela’s flat and Jamie’s place, to Clare’s friend Becca’s. No-one’s in. Angie isn’t picking up her phone either. I can’t go back to my flat. If Jamie’s still there I’ll put his head through the wall on purpose.

I get stuck in the one-way system on my second circle of the high street when Clare finally calls. I throw the steering wheel over to the left and almost get hit by a taxi as I pull into a bus stop.

“Clare? Where are you?”

I can’t understand a fucking word she’s saying through the choking and the screeching of her hysterics.

I’ve got used to the tiredness, the flashes of homicidal rage and insatiable hunger pretty easily – she wasn’t much different before she’d got pregnant – but I’ve not seen her cry so much since she was two. Now she’ll cry at adverts, at the prospect of an essay deadline, at the ending of a particularly emotional episode of EastEnders.

From the moment she showed me the secret little thing wrapped up in tissue, the positive pregnancy test, I was at her mercy. She begged me not to tell her mum. She wasn’t even twelve weeks gone.

I tell her to breathe and the snorting and the sniffing eventually dies down.

“I’m okay, I’m okay. I just - ” I catch, before she’s off again. Then she hangs up.

I sit and wait, rubbing the lump on the back of my neck, pressing it until it hurts, knuckling my thighs until they bruise. Two minutes later she calls back.

“Where are you?” I shout at her. “We’ve been worrying out of our fucking minds.”

I can actually hear her ‘fuck you’ expression down the line. “I started bleeding. I’ve been calling you all day, Matt.”

“Oh my God, Clare - ” and now I’m choking up, “I’m so sorry. Is the baby…? Are you okay? Where
are
you?”

“At the hospital. They just discharged me.” Her voice falls back into squeaks and sniffs and she can’t make sense anymore.

And? Did my niece just miscarry while I was getting arrested and feeling sorry for my stupid fucking self?

“Clare, please, is everything okay?”

A huge shuddering breath and the longest moment of my life, then: “Yes, yeah, it’s fine. They gave me a scan. Baby’s there. Fuck, Matt, there was loads of blood. Where were you?”

Her last three words echo against my eardrum and drown out the irate beeping of the bus trying to pull in behind me. Clare’s voice swamps every single stupid thing that I have packed inside my stupid head and grateful tears pour down my face. “I’m coming to get you. Wait there.”

#

When Clare gets in the car we sit in the A&E drop-off bay staring at the dashboard when we should be hugging.

“You’re really okay?” I ask her.

She nods, just once. Her face is red, blotched and drawn downwards as if she has gained a decade in an afternoon.

“What do you want to do?”

“Just go home.”

“To your mum’s?”

“No!”

“Clare, she’s not going to be angry. She’ll want to look after you.”

“She fucking hates me right now.” Clare’s usual fury has dissipated into resignation. She really believes Angela wouldn’t care. Did she get that from me? Clare winds a tissue around her index finger and stares at the smokers huddled around the hospital entrance. “She’ll say I’m just making the same mistakes she did, like her mum did.”

“Shit,” I say.

She looks sideways at me. “On your birthday, I told her I was going to drop out of uni. She went mental - well, you probably heard. Said how she’d had to work twice as hard after I was born. Like, basically, she shouldn’t have had me. She was too young.”

A whining sob compresses Clare’s voice into her throat. “How could I fucking tell her after all of that?”

And then she’s crying again and the only thing I can think to do is lay my hand on her belly. It takes a moment for the warmth of my palms to travel through her t-shirt and she stops mid-sob. There’s no little bump yet but her stomach is rigid and hot under my hand. Her breathing slows, but not because she’s winding up her energy to knock me out – I’ve never dared to touch her in any other way than awkward patting or playful headlocks for several years now – because I look up and she’s smiling crookedly.