White Lies (5 page)

Heather’s mother came by at six in the morning and I knew that she hadn’t slept either, watching the clock until it was an almost acceptable time to come over, until the milkman had been, at least, until commuters were leaving houses and trains running sleepily from their bunkers.

“Where’s the little soldier?” Alice shouted as she came through the door that first morning, flinging off gloves and layers, dumping bags of yet more baby things across the hallway. I pointed to the living room where he still slept and made a cup of tea. Matthew woke for Alice and squinted indifferently at her as she made all the appropriate noises and her skin shone, flushed, as though she had just run a mile.

“Wait ’til your mama gets home, little man,” I heard her whisper, over the boiling of the kettle, “It’ll be love at first sight.” I didn’t point out that Heather had already missed that opportunity.

I put up with that kind of talk for three weeks. Constant reassurance starts to grate after a while. “When your mama sees how
big
you’ve got, little one,” and “Won’t your mama be proud of you, drinking up all your milk?” I put up with it until the police told me the negative correlation between the time a person is missing and the chance of finding them alive. They told Alice too but she snapped her head to the side like a toddler refusing a spoon. “You don’t know my daughter,” she’d said to them. For a second I thought she was talking to me.

By the time he was a month old we had become used to our awkward routine. Alice finished the decoration of his little bedroom - not much more than a glorified cupboard, strung up with a sheep mobile and an alphabet cross-stitch wall hanging. It smelled of Alice even when she wasn’t there, soft and clean and warm and motherly. He struggled in my arms, as though I was coarse all over. He threw himself away from me, coiling backwards like he was in pain. I stood in the doorway of my bedroom and watched as she changed him, dressing him up for a walk to the shop, cooing: wouldn’t his mama love to see him looking so smart in his dungarees? Her hands moved with surety, anticipating each involuntary movement with practised ease in a way mine wouldn’t learn until I was able to try again with Alex.

Matthew had begun to watch everything with dark, unblinking, gullible eyes – finally acclimatised to this bright, loud world – as though he knew something was not quite right and had decided to start taking stock.

“You look like a little sailor boy,” Alice told him. “Oh… the big ship sails on the ally-ally-oh… ” She thought he had started to smile but I read in one of Heather’s baby books that it was probably just wind. The boy stood with her assistance, legs a year away from supporting his own weight, chin doubling – tripling – into his chest as his head flopped forward. He threw himself backwards so he could look at me. Alice made him dance and laughed at her little puppet.

“Your mama used to love that one too. She’ll sing it to you when she gets back.”

I stumbled then, even though I had been standing still. There was the limit. Once I reached beyond it, I never found a way back to the silence of before. The quiet of denial. And if I couldn’t have that falsified peace then I could make sure no-one else could either. My yell made them both startle: “Stop telling him she’ll come home!”

Matthew wailed. Alice looked away.

“Don’t promise him things that you can’t make true,” I said, quieter. “Don’t do it to yourself, or me either. It’s not fair.”

She gathered him up and held his head against her bosom, covering his ears. When she turned back to me, her face and her tone were gentler than I’d expected. “I’ll tell you what’s not fair, Peter. Pretending she never existed.”

She took the baby downstairs, placed him in the pram and tucked a blanket around his chest like a corset. Alice was the type of woman who would chase the milkman down the street for leaving a silver top instead of a gold top, which is why the worst thing she could have done was not deafen me with self-righteousness. She finished packing up the pram and wheeled him out onto the street.

“Alice… ” I couldn’t mobilise myself to follow her. A lawnmower moaned outside. I managed to make it to the front door. She reached the end of the path. The lawnmower stopped.

“Morning!” Graham from next door raised a slow hand in a wave, stalling as he saw our expressions.

Alice ignored him along with me. The lawnmower started up again, slightly more vehemently than before. Heather’s mother took a ninety-degree turn and marched the pram towards the sun. And under the cover of the lawnmower’s growl, I closed the front door and screamed at the radiator.

#

The next doorway leads through to the nursing home conservatory. The windows are blue-black, a timeless tiredness has muffled the other residents into rough-edged statues. I blink at the room, counting the hours I must have lost within that other place, my baby son’s milky breath still warm on my neck. A nurse takes my elbow and moves herself into my eyeline.

“Peter? Are you okay, love?”

I nod. They must know that yes means no when they ask that kind of question. She accepts my answer though, and brings tension to her grip, subtly pulling me forward until I follow like a pony.

“Here you are,” she says, guiding me down into a chair by a viewless window. “Tea’ll be round in a minute. Can I get you anything, Pete? One of your books?”

No-one has ever called me Pete. I want to go back to my room but I can’t find the words to tell her, and I know that once I got back there I would wish to be anywhere else. She takes my forward-facing stare to be a ‘no’ and moves on to the next abandoned mannequin. As soon as she has gone I laboriously get back to my feet and make an uneducated decision about which corridor to take. “Onwards,” I say out loud, though I didn’t mean to.

The nights are the worst. They are neither peaceful nor quiet. Angela bought me a radio that plays ‘the sounds of nature’, supposedly to help me fall asleep: rain, rivers, storms, the sea and so forth. I don’t see the point unless you are unable to urinate. No amount of rain can drown out ‘the sounds of the nursing home’: howling, grunting, coughing, dying and so forth. I failed to hide my unimpressed reaction when I unwrapped it and she called me a grumpy bastard. What’s wrong with a normal radio? One that I can actually listen to? One with longwave so I can pick up the cricket now and then? I don’t mean to offend her but I invariably do.

Whenever a purple-uniformed staff member passes me I pause, checking to see if their face belongs to Angela. I’ve lost track of her shift pattern and don’t want to have to ask. I consult a list tucked behind my eyelids: pointed chin, skin tight and shiny over her forehead, hair that curls and spirals into helices on her shoulders, eyes that grow harder by the week. The image of her dissolves whenever I try to grip hold of it. I will recognise her when I see her. I know her when I see her through a doorway.

When she was ten and Alex had just been born, I asked if she wanted to call me Dad. She looked at me kindly and said, “Peter’s fine.” I don’t know why I suggested it. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable with it either, and was glad she refused. It must have been the thrill of a new baby, the idea of a family, cementing us together. I felt a grizzled, primal pain in my chest when I saw Alex for the first time. I can’t remember when I first felt that for Matthew, but it was there just now, revisiting that empty house, that longest night.

Matthew’s birth, his birthday, every instance of small talk that leads back to his heritage - each one is shadowed with Heather’s disappearance. She is a black hole into which conversation is sucked, compressed and blinked out of existence.

I come to a double doorway at the end of a corridor but I know it will not take me anywhere new. It is an earthly thing, a man-made slab of fire-resistant timber and safety glass, nothing special about it at all. I step through into the next corridor. The same synthetic carpeting, although I recognise this hallway - it will bring me back to the semblance of home they managed to cram into my room.

Angela must not be working today. She would have come to see me if she had been. She will keep up her mask of stoicism until I am dead. I ought to tell her to stop, tell her that it’s okay for her not to be okay. I’m not her father but I have been her Peter for most of her life. I ought not to have let them put me in this place. She should be allowed to be a visitor and not my nurse. But perhaps that’s what she’s always been.

I turn left into the little cul-de-sac that contains my room and three others. Both my door, and the one opposite, are open. I stand between them and try to remember why I came back here. Something about Angela.

The sound of artificial breathing swishes into the corridor like a tide. In the room across the hall resides a skeletal being who has been kept silently but barely alive since I arrived here. She may actually be stuffed for all I can tell. Her door is permanently ajar. She sits there, propped up on her bed, unmoving and stern-faced, like Mother Whistler. At some point every day a machine next to her deathbed emits a beeping of ever-increasing pitch and volume until a nurse comes scuttling down the hall to switch it off. They will readjust a pillow or two, open or shut the curtains, pull the covers up a few inches, neaten a crease, and leave her to the oceanic rhythm of her ventilator.

I saw her move, once. The machine beeped but no-one came. I saw Whistler turn her head my way, then further, like an owl, and further still, until she looked almost one-hundred-and-eighty degrees behind her to stare yearningly at the glass of water on her bedside table. Then she fell right out of bed like a bag of kindling. She broke her collar bone and was in the hospital for two weeks before she returned, plastered, but no different. She doesn’t have any visitors. Maybe that’s the way to be. Quiet and patient and waiting for the end. I wonder if that would make Angela happy, to let her think that I’m taking this live deconstruction with some sort of grace. I want to shield her from my corrosion but I’ve never been able to lie to her. She’s the only one who can cope with what is going to happen to me. The boys can’t do this. Matthew resents every visit and Alex has stopped coming. Angela has always been the strongest of all of us - she takes appraisal of a situation in seconds before coming up with some sort of certainty. A direction. A way forward.

When she came to tell me she was pregnant, at twenty-one, with no husband, boyfriend or even a vague acquaintance to raise it with, she had no fear of my reaction. I, however, broke into a sweat.

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You want to keep it, don’t you?”

She nodded. Smiled, even.

I didn’t know why she needed approval from me, she knew I would have agreed, whatever she’d said. I had to say something, though. “Then, why don’t you move back in with us?”

We celebrated with more nodding and standing around awkwardly. I have always been too scared of inappropriate repercussions to instigate a full hug, and she has always been happy with just resting her hand on top of mine.

She was due in the summer. She and I sat one afternoon in the garden, radio on, papers divided between us, discarded sections splayed on the grass. She couldn’t seem to concentrate on reading, her belly conspicuously taking up her view. During an ad break on the radio she turned to me and said, “Do you think Heather disappeared because she was afraid?”

I didn’t have to tell her. I didn’t have to tell her anything at all, let alone the truth. I didn’t lie, at least. “Yes,” I said.

“It’s a scary thing,” she said, pressing her bellybutton down and watching it ping back out again.

“Yes. It is.”

“Did she seem happy? When Matt was born?”

I shrugged, sighed. “Not really, no. She was in shock, I think.”

“In shock. For all these years?”

I lifted my eyes to hers, just to warn her that she was getting close to the limit of her questions. She stared innocently back, newspaper face down on her enormous bump, toes scrunching grass.

“I think she was too embarrassed to come back,” I said.

Angela nodded and turned back to her reading, twisting the radio volume up as music resumed. I was sweating, despite being in the shade. What is it about that girl that makes me sweat? I flicked the paper upright, feeling cautiously safe that her curiosity had been sated, but then:

“Peter?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think Matt knows why his mum disappeared?”

“No.”

“But you do?”

I paused. She would have known if I’d lied. “Yes.”

“Are you ever going to tell him?”

She didn’t look at me when she asked, which made it easier to tell the truth.

“No.”

A painful beeping sound that doesn’t belong in the garden with Angela. Mother Whistler’s machine is alive with lights. The door to my room sits half-open and it makes me feel sick. I need to see Angela’s face, to remind myself what she looks like. If I walk the halls for long enough I’ll find her. I’ll find her and I’ll admit I’m losing her, I’ll admit that I can’t remember why Alex won’t see me, I’ll ask her what I’ve done to make him stay away. I can’t lie to her. Sometimes I think she has more of me in her than my sons do.

Chapter Five