White Lies (9 page)

We sat six inches from the screen with the volume on the lowest notch, eating cold roast chicken from the fridge, straining to hear every groan and scream. I cried silent tears behind his back, unable to move my cramping, shivering legs; my buttocks riddled with pins and needles, my veins thrilling with terror and exhilaration.

When the tape rewound itself we watched black static until an unspoken, unheard signal sent us running for our room. I lay awake until the morning, snivelling into the dark because I’d never realised how easy it would be for zombies to unlatch the garden gate and force open the dodgy window in the back porch. They could have been making their shuffling, moaning way up the stairs at that very moment and every creak and ding of the plumbing confirmed it.

The undead forged a brief truce between us. We devised a plan for zombie-proofing, an escape plan and Armageddon survival strategy that we would continue to develop in intense detail over the following few months. The only time we didn’t want to kill each other was when there were zombies to kill instead.

Now it’s his reanimated body that chases me through our old house in my nightmares. These days I let him bite me, just to get it over with. I know I won’t wake up. I need to feel the bite; canines glancing off bone, hot saliva mixed with blood dribbling down my skin, rabid eyes inches away from mine.

“Matt… ”

My eyes were closed. A palm came to rest against my cheek, the vinegar sting of hand sanitiser seeping into my pores. Someone coughed.

“Matt, this is our floor,” Sabine said. “There are people waiting.”

It was safe in the lift. Leaving meant seeing my brother. I looked down at my shoes, tied in a double bow, too tight, not the right kind at all for running from the undead. The lift went bong and the doors tried to close but Sabine stuck out an arm to stop them. “Please,” she said. Her voice broke like rotted wood, jagged and weak. She looked scared, and Sabine is never scared. She had shrunk – pale and sickly and aged and skinnier than she should be – shivering in her pyjamas with only a coat on top. She made me wonder what my face looked like, to make her face look like that.

Chapter Eight

I follow Angela up to the outpatients building, dragging my toes with each step. My lethargic brain is intrigued by the scraping noise it creates and I can’t help but enjoy the subtle irritation it provokes in my stepdaughter.

We’ve been coming to the memory clinic since before The Farm House and with a wash of irony I can remember exactly what happened at each appointment. It used to be a way to assuage Angela’s anxiety after my first stroke, a distraction from her forceful attentiveness - the visits and spot checks and medicine deliveries and unannounced drive-bys, hoping to catch me combing my hair with a fork or trying to water the plastic plant in the hall or talking to the doorbell. But now, with three little strokes under my belt and an inmate’s blank eyes, it is all pointlessly detestable. There is no recovery.

A receptionist greets us unenthusiastically and directs us to wait in a room with soft, rounded edges and a vile pink carpet stained with grey. A low coffee table covered with leaflets divides two lines of screwed-down chairs. I can’t focus well enough to read the titles.
How to Deal with Your Demented Stepfather,
possibly. Angela plucks one up, opens out the folds and tosses it back on the pile. She looks sideways at me with a smile, that all-enduring flat grin that shows just how hard it is to pretend I’m not going insane.

The receptionist picks her nose behind a glass screen that she perhaps believes to be opaque. Perhaps she just doesn’t care, liberated by an audience who won’t remember her.

Angela wears Lydia’s rings. She sits looking at the backs of her hands as if she has just realised they are turning into her mother’s. Her nails have hardened and grooved with the years, and she has even begun to file them into the same shape as Lydia’s - rounded points of a sensible length. The only sensible thing about Lydia was her fingernails, I suppose.

No wedding band for Angela. She took her mother’s advice, even though Lydia ignored it herself, twice. We were each other’s second spouse and happy never to discuss Matthew’s mother or Angie’s dad. I was an exception, Lydia said.

“We were made to make babies, not to make families. You were better off without a dad like him,” I heard her tell her daughter once. “And Alex, too.”

Instead, Lydia said, she had chosen me. I hoped Angela hadn’t bothered to study me as an example of a father. I was always tired. I couldn’t help with maths homework. I never apologised when I shouted. And I was shouting, scarlet-faced and sweating, the first time she saw me, calling her mum a silly cow for crashing her car into mine at the crossroads outside Matthew’s nursery. I yanked Matthew out of his seat, crushed him to my chest, yelling, “You bloody fool woman!” as I ran round to Lydia’s car but she was clutching her own child, sobbing sorry, sorry, sorry. Angela and Matthew looked at each other and then up at us, and it was as if they knew.

Lydia used to ask men for directions to places she knew how to get to, just so she could flirt in gratitude. She’d leave her purse on the counter in the newsagent’s so that the long-haired, dark-eyed salesman would run down the street to return it to her, and she would blush and gabble and he would touch her arm and say it was no problem. He would look nervously to me but there was nothing I could do. Flirting was her default form of communication. I often wondered if Angela’s mother had spotted me long before she drove her car into the side of mine. And a little less than nine months later, Alex was born.

An echo of a song flaps through the door as it closes behind an old woman and her nurse; someone singing louder than is socially acceptable in a corridor that rolls the sound back in thrumming resonance. The nurse nods to Angela in some sort of carer’s solidarity, or perhaps it’s a secret signal. The old woman pauses when the nurse stops her, walks when the nurse gently nudges her forward. They sit to the right of us and the woman closes down; chin to chest, hands in lap, knees falling open. The nurse fishes in her handbag for gum. Angela shuffles closer to me, lays her hand on my thigh and quickly removes it again. We are so very bad at affection. One thing we have in common.

At three, Matthew was a little watery-eyed silent thing who liked to sit as close as humanly possible to Angela on the sofa - hip bones sticking into her thighs, his arm squashed up against her side, head a few bare inches away from resting on her shoulder. He never made it that far, though he seemed to long to do so.

Lydia would roll her eyes and pull us into rough hugs, kissing our ears, leaving bells ringing inside. Alex would climb up legs and onto laps and throttle us with love, his open-mouthed kisses full of teeth. I patted heads and nodded solemnly, the sort of expression to be adopted when confronted with something I don’t know how to react to. I can feel the frown clamping at my muscles now as the doctor leans around her doorway and asks us to come through. But her doorway has no magic, I can tell, and I don’t move until Angela prods me in the fat underneath my arm.

My doctor is younger than Angela, with deep brown skin and eyes whose irises are almost as dark as her pupils. I may be no good at physical contact but something about her manner makes me want to crawl into a ball on her lap. I’m fairly sure she would be too polite and professional to mind. Doctor Samyal consults her notes, smiling every so often, trying to divide her attention between me and my chaperone. It’s a careful balance, and one she negotiates well: don’t make the patient feel like a child, but ensure that any important information is retained by the one with a properly working brain. I watch her and nod without listening, trying to keep my expression as neutral as possible because after our last appointment Angela said I looked at the doctor like I wanted to kiss her.

My straight-faced response has always failed with Angela, ever since she discovered brown blood in her knickers and rushed to tell me because her mother was at work, and she didn’t seem to think it mattered that I didn’t share her body parts. The pain must have shown clearly on my face as I rummaged through the basket in the bathroom that contained Lydia’s products and creams for things I didn’t normally investigate.

Angela took Lydia’s stance on embarrassment: it’s something that only applies to other people. “We talked about it at school,” she told me. “They gave us free tampons but I don’t have any left because we threw them all at the boys.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to answer. I passed her a pad and a tampon of every colour I could find. “You know what to do?”

“Mmm hmm. They gave us a booklet too. Thanks, Peter.”

Nod. “And you know what it all means? Uh…
It?
”

“It means I can have babies now.”

“You’re twelve, you’re not having babies yet.”

“Yes, but it means that I
can
.” She laughed at me gently, elated – part of the great women’s club at last – blushing with the happy knowledge that tampons were no longer just surplus missiles to be launched at the sniggering boys in her class, to make them squirm with the same uncertainty and discomfort I felt fifty-odd years on.

It didn’t get easier. I reacted in much the same way when she did, in fact, have a baby ten years later. I was the first to know then, too. Lydia was dead and I was alone again, navigating the terrifyingly familiar territory of being responsible for children I wasn’t prepared for.

I studied the rays of sunshine on the ultrasound and gave an emphatic nod.

I took Clare in my arms the day she was born and pressed my face against her blanket to blot away the tears I pretended I wasn’t crying.

I walked her up and down the hall while she wailed out her colic.

I watched her cobalt-blue eyes roll ecstatically as she breastfed, the little dimples of her inverted knuckles pawing at her mother’s necklace, a lazy smile on her lips.

I remember this. I remember all of it, in blossoming, flaring Technicolour, and yet there are times when I don’t recognise Angela’s face.

I have a pencil in my hand, a blank notepad on the desk between me and the doctor and I cannot recall what has just been said.

She asks me to copy a picture of interlocking shapes, and I fail, just like last time. She asks me to remember three words: chair, blue and blackbird, which I am to repeat back to her at the end of the consultation and I am able to do so. I am told that there is a difference between two apparently identical pictures and asked to spot it but I can’t. I am not embarrassed. I am not upset. I am filled up with a vacancy that is not unpleasant, because it is not anything at all.

Angela is troubled. She’s spent too much time around people losing their minds, I know. She can anticipate how it’s going to go, how it’s going to end, except this time she’s the relative and not the nurse. Or she’s both, which is twice as awful. I cannot comfort her and I don’t want to try.

The doctor writes out an appointment card, explaining to Angela about a new set of exercises which will help to maintain as much memory function as possible, intermittently blinking kindly and regretfully at me. I jerk to my feet. By the time they react with echoing repetitions of “Peter? Peter?” I am already out the door and down the corridor, and even though Angela catches up with me at the foyer I don’t let her slow me down. I know exactly where I’m going. She follows me unobtrusively out of the clinic and all the way to the high street shoe shop that used to be a travel agency where Heather once worked. I sit on one of the chairs with my feet on a foot-measuring stool and ask the shop assistant if she knew, if she was even aware that this place used to be a travel agency. If she knew that Heather worked here. A bit of accounting, that’s what she did. And some secretarial duties. She hated it. She hated everything, by the end. The shop assistant didn’t know, and she shakes her head with a slow, patient, painfully tolerant expression. Angela sits down next to me and waits quietly until I allow her to persuade me to go back to the home.

#

I don’t remember dinner, or getting into my pyjamas, or taking my medication, but when the resonance of Heather’s workplace finally leaves me I find myself sitting up in my bed, steeped in the catnip stink of my room, with the ocean-sounds radio set to some sort of waterfall. It is as if I have been dug up and replanted, like a sickly tree. Perhaps if you put it in the shade at the back by the fence it will survive, and if it dies you won’t notice, it won’t be missed.

I may be falling asleep or I may be falling through some sort of horizontal doorway, but all I can keep hold of is the image of a woman I thought I once knew. Perhaps I saw her in the shoe shop, or out of the window of the car, or in the conservatory back at The Farm House - a woman, a witch, a figment of an untethered imagination. She remains when I close my eyes, threading a voice through the hair inside my ears, telling a story that I’ve heard before, to the rhythm of a bleating heartbeat:

A prince. Waiting for his execution. And a bell, ringing a hole in his head as he sat in his stone cell and swore instead of prayed at the dirt under his feet.