White Lies (4 page)

I pulled my mouth into a brief smile and raised a guilty hand. Clare sank several inches lower in her seat.

“Would you like to order some dessert, birthday boy?” The waitress grinned, and started stacking plates and wiping the tabletop. As she leaned across me, her blouse brushed my cheek and I blushed like an adolescent, then winced, feeling the coldness of Sabine’s sneer beside me.

I passed the waitress my plate. “No. Shall we get the bill?”

“I’ll have a coffee, please,” Sabine said mildly, though her ambivalent expression was a poor mask for what I knew lay beneath.

Angela’s attention shifted from her stepfather to her daughter, who was chewing ice cubes noisily and kicking the central leg of the table.

“You’ve hardly eaten anything.”

Clare shrugged jerkily, “I’m not hungry.”

Angela lowered her voice while the waitress jutted out a hip and fixed her smile, hand hovering above Clare’s barely touched plate. “What was the point of ordering if you’re not going to eat it?”

“I’ve eaten breadsticks.”

Angela sighed in exasperation. The waitress moved round to Dad’s side of the table and loitered uncertainly, waiting for him to notice her and put down his utensils.

“Take it home then,” Angela said, “we can ask for a doggy bag.”

“Jesus, Mum. Stop trying to force-feed me. I don’t want it. I’m sorry. I didn’t even want to come.” She flicked her eyes momentarily up to mine in apology. I smiled my first genuine smile of the evening back at her.

I could feel the ache of my niece’s embarrassment as she shrank in her seat under the scrutiny of the entire table. Angela had adopted Dad’s hardness rather than her mum’s laissez-faire approach to parenting. Clare’s bland ‘kill-me-now’ expression felt so familiar, as if there weren’t sixteen years between us. The reverberating noises of the other diners seemed to close in even more tightly as Angela watched her face for submission and tried to ignore Dad’s incessant fork-turning. A meatball rolled off his plate, across the table and into her handbag. The waitress stifled a squeak and fished it out with seamless professionalism.

“Let me just take that, shall I?” she said to Dad, sweeping his plate onto the carefully balanced arrangement on her arm and leaving him with a redundant fork, dangling with cold noodles.

“What’s wrong with you?” Angela hissed at Clare.

“How about some ice cream?” the waitress suggested enthusiastically, as though Clare was a decade younger.

“No. Thank you,” Clare said politely. Then, to her mother, a vicious whisper: “I feel sick, okay?”

“Leave her alone, Angie!” Dad boomed, and the conversation in the restaurant fell into a sudden curious lull. “She’s not bloody hungry.” As the noise gradually and uncertainly returned to half its previous level, he reached for the wine bottle and filled his empty water glass.

“Peter, you shouldn’t, not with your medication - ” Angela said, and the waitress’ smile fell a few millimetres, her eyes fixed on the fork still in Dad’s fist.

Dad knocked back the wine like it was a shot and ceremoniously tossed his fork into the empty glass. The waitress swiped it away and quickly retreated to the kitchen. Peter raised a finger, as if we were all still mid-conversation: “And I’m not the only one who had the decency to keep quiet about things that don’t need to be discussed in the middle of a bloody restaurant.” He jabbed the finger into the table in front of Angela, “
Your
mother could keep a secret, I’ll tell you that now.”

“Fucking hell,” I said.

“She might not have been honest, but she kept her mouth shut.”

“Okay, we’re going home,” Angela said, face flushed and downturned, aware that the people at the tables around us had stopped talking.

“You mean,
you’re
going home.
I’m
going back to that nuthouse.”

“Peter!”

Clare lurched forward in her seat, the skin of her face almost translucent with a sudden draining of blood, “I’m going to be sick,” she said, and bolted for the bathroom.

“I’ll go with her,” Sabine offered, but the screeching of Angela’s chair on the tile floor stopped her.

“No,” Angela snapped, “I’ll go. You two get him outside.”

“Cart the old man off, that’s right,” Dad said, shoving his chair backwards and steadying himself on the table. “Where’s Alex?” he asked – the first of what was to be innumerable times – not that we knew it then. “I thought Alex was coming.”

“Dad, shut up,” I said, as I scooped up coats and bags and tried to head him off before he toppled into the diners next to them.

“Don’t tell your dad to shut up,” Sabine said. And that was the moment, I reflected later, that it was probably all over for us.

We weaved Dad through the maze of tables to the front door, no time for embarrassment as we focused solely on avoiding knocking over any glasses or bumping into passing waiters, while my dad grumbled and protested at our treatment. As we passed the door to the toilets we could hear Clare’s voice, high and strained, calling her mum a bitch, asking why couldn’t she just let her make her own fucking decisions. And Angela losing it, slamming a palm against a cubicle door, saying for God’s sake, Clare, you’re acting like a child.

The waitress, waiting at the front desk, didn’t even attempt a smile as we pushed Dad through the door, yanking his arms into his coat like an overtired toddler.

The cold air struck us into silence. We gathered ourselves for a moment on the pavement outside, eyes adjusting to the streetlight glare and the flashing of headlamps on the wet road, wrapping scarves around our throats and shoving hands into pockets.

“Where did Angie park?” I said, but Sabine ignored me and Dad shrugged. A laugh curled up and died in my throat.

I shook Angela’s handbag until I was able to follow the sound of jingling keys to an exterior pocket. I aimed the remote at the dark lines of parked cars on the street, eventually saw the blink of her car’s indicators down to the right, and herded my unwilling companions towards it.

By the time we reached the car, Dad seemed to have deflated to half his previous size inside his coat, eyes no longer full of the righteous anger that so effectively destroyed my right to reply. He let me help him into the back seat of Angela’s Fiesta and folded his hands into his lap.

I slammed the door harder than I needed to and leaned against the side of the car. Sabine was looking at her phone, and I had no chance to say anything apologetic before Angela came jogging up.

“Where is he? Is he okay?”

I nodded to the car. “Where’s Clare?”

“Still in the toilets. How much do I owe you?”

“What? Oh. Shit.”

“You didn’t pay? Oh my God, Matthew.”

Angela snatched her bag out of my hands and ran back round the corner to the restaurant, returning a few minutes later, still alone, with a voice that said there was a lump high up in her throat.

“Well, we’re not going there again. Clare’s not inside. Did you see her come out?”

We shook our heads.

“She’s driving me mad. She hates me at the moment. She - ” Angela sighed, decided against explaining. Asking for help seemed to almost cause her physical pain. “She’s probably gone to Becca’s. And I need to get Peter home. Back, I mean.”

I wanted to hug her but I waited too long to carry out the thought and she began scrambling in her bag, trying to hide her reddening face. I hated Sabine, then, for her lack of womanly solidarity. She should have been the one to be patting Angela’s arm and telling her it would all be okay, but she stood there, scrolling with one finger on her phone’s screen, as though she couldn’t hear us at all.

“I’ll take him,” I said, but Angela emerged from her handbag and thrust a gift-wrapped rectangle at me.

“Happy birthday. Sorry, Matt. I’ll talk to you later. If you hear from Clare, let me know, okay?”

When her car had disappeared over the hill, Sabine and I found ourselves still standing apart from each other, looking in different directions - too much distance for us to be a couple.

My phone rang and I answered it without seeing who it was, regretting it the moment I heard the response to my hello.

“Matty,” Alex said. “Are you home? I’m coming over.”

Chapter Four

The doorway calls. The belt of my dressing gown slithers along the carpet as I step through and leave my bedroom behind, a breadcrumb trail back to the present. For a moment, in the space within the portal, there is unadulterated silence, full of the promises of death. Onward. Onward to go backward, following the scent of a time long gone but never forgotten. How could I forget this night? I emerge the other side, wavering with the shift of gravity. It takes time to adjust to the change in the spinning of the earth, but then I solidify, feet rooting into the ground like bindweed.

Home. Standing in the perfect trapezium of light cast by the streetlamp outside the living room, a week-old baby in my arms.

And alone.

I thought it wouldn’t be for long. I thought she’d come back. I thought then that this terror would last no longer than a few days.

The night I took Matthew home from the hospital was longer than a night had any right to be. The house was all at once unfamiliar, as though Heather had taken with her the essence of what had made it mine.

I drop into this young, uncertain body and begin to sway without realising it - a pendulous movement that doesn’t need to be learned. I avoid looking at the baby as I walk slow circles around the living room, trying to find something that truly belongs to me, trying to find an anchor.

Windows filmed with condensation. A fat sponge on the sill, waiting for its morning work. Heather’s work. I would leave the glass unwiped until black blossoming mould began to creep across the panes. The curtains hang open, unlined, because Heather loathed her sewing machine and told it so whenever she hauled it onto the kitchen table. Above the mantelpiece the sunburst clock that I can’t stand glows bronze in the low light, an instrument of auditory torture. Heather’s choice, or was it a gift from her mother? A blanket embroidered with Matthew’s initials lies rumpled on the sofa in the shape of a mountain range. The house is full of baby things. They conspire against me and pile into corners – I do not recognise any of it, not the booties, the bottles, the bibs, the bassinette – Heather’s choice, Heather’s choice, Heather’s choice. I wonder if she had started to systematically remove me from the house long before Matthew arrived.

He stirs in my arms, heavy with awkwardness. I do not want to put him down in case he breaks. I do not want him to cry again because that was worse than any stroke, any heart attack - electricity running through his lungs into my nervous system. He had wailed without warning, an acute note of outrage at crossing the threshold from the front step to the hallway. There was no-one to consult, no-one to look to, no-one to take half of the knifing noise into their ears. The house rang with the sound and I felt nothing but pity for myself.

My aged self slips quietly into my younger body and forces my eyes downwards, to the little face turned away from the street light, turned in, to the valley between my chest and my arm. I am struck by how much the baby Matthew looks like the man, how I didn’t know then how he would look when he was grown. Now, it is just so obvious. There’s the eye, the lip, the hairline, the ear. The fluency of handling a child sweeps through me and I adjust him so that he lies across my arm, legs dangling, cheek squashing his mouth into a questioning O. He settles once more, a dead weight.

I walk through the house from front to back, something I didn’t do the first time I was here. I squint into the darkness of the kitchen windows, wondering if his mother is out there, if she came to see him this night, crouching behind the garden hedge, peering into the lighted rooms while we paced. Or whether she was already far from here.

Matthew slept for five hours, woke at three to nuzzle a bottle of milk and went back to sleep. Thirty-five years ago I managed, eventually, to put him down - clumsily swaddled in the Moses basket Heather had taken forty minutes to choose over the other almost identical option in the shop. I had only touched him to feed him, supporting his swollen head like I was told to, wiping the white tracks that flowed from the corners of his mouth and burping him until he threw most of it back up on my shoulder. This time my young hands are made strong with the gift of being possessed by my elderly self. Two hands, intact and steady. I nestle him into my chest, breathe a soft Edelweiss into his ear, humming when I don’t know the words, rhyming bright with light, white, night. New lyrics about hearts rising and falling, fall and rise forever. He doesn’t mind. Alice knew the right words and he’d learn them from her in time.

But I can feel the link fading, my ghost losing weight, drawn by the magnetism of the door to the hall. Another door. Another time left behind. I know what happens next and I must move onwards, ever on. The new father’s fear begins to take hold again, a nauseous twist, a collapsing tunnel. He will be alright. I promise him that as I close the door behind me.

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