White Lies

by Jo Gatford

  I am still in the kitchen, waiting for the beans to cool. I won’t make it as far as the hospital, I can tell. Time is viscous here, and not every doorway is active. Ingrid’s door led only to this moment, and when I walk through to the sitting room I will find myself somewhere, sometime else. I’ve learnt to accept it, to appreciate my younger form with its ten fingers and toes, before the accident, before age took its pound of flesh.

  In the last few minutes before Lydia starts to knock I hear Matthew jump from the footstool to the sofa with a thumping creak that used to make me bark with irritation. By the time Alex was his age, we’d given up trying to implement common sense rules like no jumping on the furniture. If they fell, they would learn. The rules were different for Matthew back then. At least from me. Lydia never minded anything much at all.

  Matthew and Lydia were never closer than during her recovery in the hospital, a closeness that dissipated as soon as the demands of a newborn Alex came fully into play. But there on the postnatal ward, Matthew was the only one who wasn’t bothered by her denial. He spent his visiting time curled up next to her, amazed by the stitches in her stomach, incredulous and delighted that she would let him pour himself glass after glass of water from the little plastic jug on her bedside table - drinking so much one day that he wet her bed.

  I don’t think he had thought far enough ahead to realise that we would be taking Alex home. I don’t think I had thought ahead enough to think that Alex would even survive. But two weeks to the day he was born we took a shell-shocked car journey back to the house. And then there were five.

  Chapter Seven

  The night Alex died, the night he found out that Dad wasn’t his dad, I almost had an urge to hug him. But maybe it was just the novelty of feeling sorry for him.

  Alex looked at me – well, two inches to the right of me, while the rest of him swayed to the left – and grimaced, as if waiting for the fraternal sympathy he knew would never come.

  I took a step away from him. It didn’t make sense. I was the one who didn’t fit. I was the one with the mysterious parentage. I’d dreamt of discovering the same thing – that I didn’t belong to Dad after all – of claiming some sort of freedom, some other life waiting for me far away from him. It made no fucking sense at all. If Alex wasn’t his son then why did Dad love him more than me?

  Everyone was looking at me for some sort of reaction. Alex’s expression was triumphant in a miserable, tired sort of way. I took in a breath and blew it out again when I couldn’t think of any decent words to say. Then another, and a perfunctory follow-up question: “So, who is?”

  “Who’s who?”

  “Your dad.”

  “I don’t fucking know! Are you gonna drive me there or not?”

  “No.”

  No fucking way. Dad never had any problem shouting at me, but whenever Alex confronted him all he could manage was a horrifying wounded silence. I was not about to invite myself to that bombshell explosion, even if I was sort of perversely intrigued to know whether Dad had any clue that Lydia had kept him as a cuckold all these years. And on this thought I must have accidentally blown a snort of a laugh out of my nose, because everyone looked at me with the same disgusted face.

  “You’re loving this, aren’t you?” Alex said quietly. Sabine and Jamie shifted their gazes over to Alex and back to me.

  “Loving what?”

  “You can have Dad all to yourself now.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, are you fucking mental?”

  All three of them were waiting for my poker face to slip. I got lost somewhere between a shrug and a sigh. “Just go home,” I said, as calmly as I could. Alex didn’t move.

  “Maybe you should talk to your sister first,” Sabine suggested mildly.

  “Yeah, talk to Angie. Maybe she’ll take you tomorrow,” I said, inching myself around as if I could subtly herd him back toward the door.

  “What’s she got to do with it?” he snapped.

  “Well, what have I got to do with it?” I snapped back. It was late. It was Sunday. I had work in the morning. I’m not proud of it.

  “He’s your dad!”

  “What? You think this is some kind of conspiracy? He was probably as oblivious as you. If you tell him… Alex, you’re going to destroy him.”

  “So what? What about me? Am I supposed to just ignore this?” He shook the letter so hard his fingers tore through it.

  “He brought you up!”

  “So what?”

  “So what? You’re his fucking little golden boy. And I’ll bet you anything he hasn’t got a clue that you’re not his.”

  I could picture Dad’s face as he read Alex’s letter, how his hands would tremble and his lips would struggle to stay still, how his eyes would close, the tears that would escape from behind the lids, the long exhalation through his nose, the attempt at a smile. What was the point in a painful truth? Why did Alex want to wound him for a secret Lydia kept? And why did I care if he hurt him at all?

  “You’d want to tell him, if it was you,” Alex said.

  “No, I wouldn’t. I’d keep my fucking mouth shut.” I didn’t need another reason for Dad to resent me. “You had two parents who loved you, isn’t that enough?”

  “So did you,” Alex shot back. “Didn’t stop you trying to find out about your mum, did it?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “It’s pretty fucking similar.”

  I stood over him, finger jabbing towards his face, while he sank back into the sofa cushions as if I was nothing more than a yappy little puppy. My voice was rising to a squeal while his switched down to a quiet, calm rumble, but I couldn’t stop the heat from rising in my face, couldn’t stop wanting to close my fingers around his windpipe to make him stop talking. “The difference is,” I said, “they wanted you.”

  And Alex’s response was a smile. And that’s what killed him.

  I snatched his vodka away. He propelled himself to his feet and slapped the glass out of my hand. There was a pause while we watched it spin and come to rest under the coffee table. Orange juice blotted into the carpet.

  “This is not about you,” Alex said.

  “No, no its not. It’s about my dad,” I said. I mirrored him with a smile, an awful clenched thing that hurt the muscles in my face. “My dad. Mine. Not yours. How fucking ironic.”

  Alex swayed onto the tips of his toes and back on his heels and forward again. Then he tried to hit me.

  He tried to hit me and he fell.

  He fell and he hit his head.

  It was an accident.

  There’s a great big dent in the plaster.

  I’m never going to get my deposit back now.

  He wasn’t bleeding. Sabine and I tried to help him up but he pushed us away and stormed out like a drunken tornado with Jamie trailing after. I picked up the glass and chucked a tea towel over the damp patch, rolling my eyes at Sabine.

  She looked back with distate. “What’s wrong with you? He’s your brother.”

  #

  He was four and I was eight. I can remember the warmth of his little bony body pressed up against my back, skinny arms wrapped around my shoulders, chest going in and out like a foot pump, his hot breath on the back of my ear. We were at the open-air swimming pool, as cold as corpses, our dad and his mum, Lydia, watching us from the grass, imagining we were having fun. I waded round the shallow end with Alex like a leech on my back, legs numb, lungs constricted from the cold. When I reached the side I laid my arms on the warm stone and let the sun dry my face.

  “Don’t stop,” he ordered.

  “I’m tired.”

  “Keep going!”

  “No, get off. I’m getting out.”

  “I don’t want to get out!”

  “Then learn to swim.” It was cruel. I know that. I unhooked his arms from around my neck, uncrossed his ankles from around my stomach and launched him backwards into the icy water.

  I turned as slowly as I dared to save my brother fro
m his ten-second drowning, pulled him out of the water by his armpits and sat him on the side. He started crying in the same hyperventilating, screechy tone that he used when he would still occasionally shit himself. Rage and humiliation. He spat water in my face and attempted a few weak slaps which were ignored by Lydia and Dad as they marched over furiously.

  His mum swept him up into a ready towel and shushed and placated and sweet-nothinged him quiet. Dad loomed over, casting me in shadow. “You will never do that again,” he said, deadly quiet. No finger pointing, no rough grabbing of my upper arm, no spank. He just turned away and went to buy Alex an ice cream.

  I swam all the way to the deep end and stayed there until it was time to go home, even though I was afraid that the shark that lived beneath the filter grates at the dark bottom of the pool was going to burst free and bite my legs off. At that moment, I would have chosen a watery, sharky death over having to sit on the damp grass with my dad and his other family.

  #

  It was two-thirty in the morning. We dressed hastily, clumsily, haphazardly, as if there was a rush. “I should call someone,” I said. “Angela. Clare. Dad… Oh Jesus, Dad.”

  Sabine passed me a pair of socks and shook her head, “Worry about him later.” She’d stared like a gutted fish when I told her what Jamie had told me, but shock gave way to uncertainty at the fact that I wasn’t crying because my brother was dead. The pressure to cry was almost worse than trying to process the information.

  “Are you sure?” she kept repeating, as if I’d heard him wrong, as if I were an idiot. Every “yes” I was forced to say made me feel less and less, until I was so numb I couldn’t even put on my own shoes.

  Sabine knelt on the floor and tied my shoelaces for me. Then she dialled Angela’s number and put the phone in my hand. I couldn’t remember if she was on a shift or not. I left some sort of vague message on her answer machine that didn’t say what had happened but must have scared the shit out of her nonetheless. Sabine went into the living room and started taking quick, squeaky intakes of breath.

  At the hospital she led me by the hand through rubber floored corridors as if I were blind. We squeezed into a lift full of glazed middle-of-the-night visitors and mourners and worriers. An automated announcement repeatedly told us to use the sanitiser gel to minimise infection and I couldn’t tell if we were moving up to a ward or down to a morgue. My fists clenched around the hem of my coat until my nails began to burn. There could be no worse vision than Alex’s body on a slab.

  He was always into all of that shit - gore and horror and those gruesome bits at the back of lads’ magazines about people managing to mutilate themselves or break bones in disgusting ways, or those programmes about teenagers riding their BMXs down flights of concrete steps and smashing their faces in, or skaters shattering their kneecaps, or dumb DIYers nail-gunning their feet to the floor, or a kid who shot himself in the head with his dad’s shotgun and survived with half a skull. Alex laughed and I cringed. He boasted a wrist-to-elbow scar from trying to jump between the roof of the bike shelter and the prefab toilet block when he was thirteen. Maybe I could identify him from that jagged mark, without having to look at his face. They’d called me into the school office to stay with him until the ambulance arrived and his eyes seemed full of the blood that had drained out of his face. Splintered and unblinking. He wouldn’t look at me but the moment I sat next to him he clutched onto my arm with his good hand and wouldn’t let go until the sirens were turning and the paramedics sent me back to class.

  He counted his stitches like a miser hoarding pennies, tortured me with descriptions of the way the skin was starting to fuse back together. He took pictures of the wound so he could recreate it with face paint to turn himself into a zombie for Halloween. He’d borrowed Night of the Living Dead off Jamie’s cousin when he was eight and I was twelve, persuaded me to watch it with him one Sunday night while Dad and Lydia slept.

  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.