White Lies

by Jo Gatford

  It’s Jamie: “Matty. Are you there? I need to talk to you.”

  I haven’t seen him since the funeral where he stood blank-eyed and pale, barely-contained fury rising to the surface of his skin whenever he looked at me. I get it. He and Alex operated with almost supernatural synchronisation when they were kids, allied in the glee they found in treating me like shit. And he blames me.

  Dad and Lydia looked on him with a mix of affection and suspicion. I think they secretly hoped that he was some kind of corrupt influence on Alex they could lay blame on. Of course it could never be the case that Alex’s antisocial unpleasantness was his own doing. When they were kids they called it the cheekiness of boys. When they were teenagers they called it rebellion. When they were young adults they were simply no longer within parental control.

  “Look after your brother,” were my daily orders when we left for school, but no-one, apparently, was meant to look after me.

  Before I hang up, the saved messages start to play, and even though I know I have plenty of time to avoid the misery that is about to occur, I do nothing to stop it. The first one is from Angie, a few days ago, asking how Clare is and telling her that she has some post to pick up from home. She hopes we’re both okay. Beep. I should hang up now. A muscle in my wrist twitches. But still I listen, standing up to the approaching pain with all the likelihood of jumping over a tsunami.

  Second saved message: “Alright dick-brain? Are you going to see Dad on Sunday? I need a lift. And I downloaded something for you, I’ll give it to you then. Ring me back.”

  Alex. Immortalised by BT, before he got the letter from his mum, before he drained two bottles of cheap wine and came knocking on my door. Before I killed him. I should be crying but I’m dry. My headache has mutated into throbbing and my jaw will not unclench. I can’t feel my fingers around the phone.

  I found the birthday gift he’d meant to give me at his flat – a DVD of a new zombie film – still the only real connection we had. That, and the silent agreement to keep our mutual disinterest in football a secret from Dad, who used to demand full, religious concentration whenever Fulham played.

  When I was twelve and Alex was eight, Dad took us to a home game. It was the last time he ever held my hand, keeping hold of us among the inescapable mass, the huge symbiotic entity of the crowd, rising and undulating and swearing all together. Indecipherable noise made up of the echo of thousands of voices, all a little late, out of sync, all chanting something that I never quite heard properly but it didn’t matter - I could sense the threat in it, the low murderous edge, the bite, the brick. A mob of testosterone. Alex fitted right in. I cowered in my cold plastic seat, clutching a gristly burger, trying to distract myself by counting the pieces of chewing gum on the seat in front of me. Someone had written ‘Steve is a penus’ on the seat-back – with accompanying illustration – then realised their mistake, crossed out the word ‘penus’ and replaced it with ‘cock’.

  I confided in Lydia that I desperately didn’t want to go to the next game. And in typical, wonderful Lydia fashion, she had no qualms about lying to my dad, told him I’d been invited to a friend’s birthday party that day. Dad took Alex and Jamie instead and never asked me to come along again. Even though Dad couldn’t stand the kid, Jamie was a better son than I was.

  Why the fuck is he calling me now? Whatever association we had should have died with Alex. What could he possibly want?

  I press the phone against my ear until it hurts, the automated voice repeatedly asking me to make a fucking choice or return to the main menu. I hang up and call Sabine again.

  “Hi,” comes a sigh, rather than a greeting.

  I hadn’t actually expected her to pick up. Shit. “Hi.”

  “I’m not going to ask if you’re okay. You’re not okay. Why are you calling me?”

  “I miss you.”

  “I know you do. I’m working.” A long pause, in which I suspect she is calculating how much straight-talking I can cope with. She acquiesces, uncharacteristically, says softly: “I’ll call you later.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Okay.” She hangs up the way people do in films, without saying goodbye.

  I look in the fridge for some lunch, but there is only leftover funeral food.

  #

  I catch up with Clare that same afternoon, joining her in an alternating puke-fest that has us up for most of the night. It must have been something from the funeral spread - prawns on little blini pancake things probably. We shouldn’t have kept the food this long. Frozen, defrosted, hoarded in the fridge, as if it represented the last vestiges of my brother, the body of the fucking antichrist.

  When the intervals between toilet visits stretch further and further apart and finally slow to dry heaves, we convene on the sofa, grumbling and watching early morning TV to try to distract from the pain of our stretched, outraged stomachs.

  “At least you’re used to throwing up,” I say.

  Clare can’t even muster the energy to swear at me, or hit me. It’s a nice change.

  We doze for an hour or two. She goes off to sit in the bath. Behind closed eyes I listen to a TV medium channel messages from some woman’s dead daughter who wants her to move house and make a fresh start, maybe somewhere abroad. The mother says she likes warm weather. And the sea. The daughter was such a good girl, she says. She died of complications following a routine operation. The mother cries. The audience applauds. Someone knocks viciously on my door and the hole in the wall opens like a dark gaping mouth and my stupid brain immediately assumes Alex is back to claim his revenge and my shoulders start shuddering.

  I’m hearing things. I’m going mad. Early-onset dementia. A tumour. Schizophrenia. A psychotic episode. A brain aneurysm. I turn up the TV but the knocking gets louder. Has he come to smash my head through the wall? I’m going fucking insane.

  A muffled shout comes through the door. “Matty?” It really is him. I’m going to puke again. I lurch off the sofa and lean my forehead against the closed bathroom door. “Clare, let me in, I’m gonna throw up.”

  “Who’s at the door?”

  Fuck, it’s real then. She can hear it too.

  “No-one. Let me in!”

  “I’m naked!”

  “Clare!”

  “Matty!” yells the ghost. Except it’s not a ghost. I know that voice. I fall into a crouch and clutch at my guts.

  “Matt, get the door,” Clare orders, and all at once she’s her mother and I have to do as she says.

  Jamie looks worse than I do, if that’s possible. He has rubbed his eyes red and purple, the bags beneath them are swollen, the skin of his eyelids peels at the edges. His lips are cracked and pale against stubble at least a week old. Doesn’t smell like he’s washed much in that time either. At odds with the rest of him, his hair has been meticulously waxed into its usual style and he is dressed in a suit, as though stuck in his funereal mourning attire.

  “Hi,” he says quietly.

  “I’m ill,” I reply, lamely. “We’ve both been up all night being sick.”

  “Oh. Is Clare okay?”

  Don’t mind me. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Oh. Can I - Can I come in?”

  “Why?” I didn’t mean to say that. He falters. I open the door wider and wave him forward. “Yeah, yeah, come in. Sorry about the smell.”

  He makes a disgusted face but steps across the threshold. I have invited the vampire inside my home. He considers the sofa – covered with possibly infected and dribbled upon duvets and pillows, screwed up tissues, and an ice cube tray – but decides against it and leans on the kitchen counter instead.

  His eyes fix on the hole in the wall. Mine still sweep by it whenever I look in that direction in a pathetic act of self-preservation. I hear him swallowing down thick spit as he forces his gaze away.

  “He just fell over,” he says. “He didn’t even put his hands out to break the fall. Just keeled over. Like he was dead before he even hit the ground.”

&
nbsp; I heard the technical story from the doctor but the most I had exchanged with Jamie since the accident was a nod at the crematorium.

  “He wasn’t though. Dead, I mean,” he says, “I checked his pulse. He was still alive but he wasn’t there at all. You know? In his eyes.”

  Shit, he wants to talk about it. All I can do is measure the distance between where I stand and the sink in case I need to throw up again.

  “He wouldn’t let go of the letter,” Jamie says, glaring at me in an awful, wounded way. My stomach flips. We hear the gurgle of the plughole and Clare brushing her teeth.

  “I need your help,” he says, jaw clenched tight, because clearly I am the last person he would ever choose to help him.

  “What?”

  “Alex wanted to find his dad. Meet him. His mum had put his name and stuff in the letter. He owns a load of restaurants.”

  Clare appears in the bathroom doorway wearing my dressing gown and two pairs of socks. She stares at Jamie more vehemently than she’s ever looked at me and it’s a comfort to know her hate is indiscriminate. She walks tentatively into the kitchen and hangs on my arm. Jamie drops his chin like a reprimanded dog.

  “So?” I say. “You want to track him down? Why do you need me?”

  Jamie looks like he wants me to collapse on the spot like Alex did. “I don’t know, I thought you might want to make amends.”

  “For what?” I ask slowly.

  Jamie shifts his weight away from the counter in a subtly menacing movement. “What do you think? He’d still be alive if it wasn’t for his selfish fucking brother,” he says quietly, emphasising the last three words as though he were stamping on my face.

  Clare, to my deepest horror, doesn’t leap to defend me. She stays silent for a telling second before speaking in an unconvincing monotone: “Alex was the one who tried to hit him. It was an accident.”

  “Well. If I were you I’d feel guilty,” Jamie says. “I’d want to do something. His real dad should know he existed.”

  His passive-aggressive calmness makes me itch. “What the hell would I say? ‘Hi, you had a son, but now he’s dead. Oh and his mum’s dead too. Just thought you should know. See ya!’ What is the fucking point?”

  Jamie points at the hole in the living room wall but I can’t look at it. “Because it was the last wish of your dead brother.”

  Clare nods slowly beside me. Frustrated anger shoves the nausea aside. I follow Jamie’s eyes to my keys lying on the counter. And then it’s clear.

  “And I’m the only one with a car,” I say.

  He shrugs. That’s settled then. Perfect.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When the kitchen boy comes by my room I mistake him for Alex at first - he has little grey eyes and a hairline further back than his age should suggest. A flash of my boy for a moment, before my smile weakens and he tosses a small green cling film-wrapped rectangle onto my bed. He nods, closes the door, and leaves me feeling like I’ve been knifed in the chest. I hold the package in my lap for an hour until the warmth sends a sweet incriminating scent into the air and either I fall asleep or I lose an hour or two on standby, because I wake to my dentist cupping my face with a cold hand asking, “Where did you get this, Peter?” and telling me to hide the weed, pressing it into my palm and closing my fingers around it.

  Another leap through time. Her hand is replaced by the frozen slap of a pre-rain wind that stings my cheeks. I am on a bench, oddly positioned halfway up a small bank that leads to a cow field, facing the uninspiring view of the nursing home’s conservatory. I find the cellophane package in my pocket but I don’t know how much of the stuff to put into my cigarette so I opt for half green, half tobacco. My hands shake as I try to get a decent handle on my lighter. It feels too late to be engaging in a rebellion but as the first draw enters my lungs I can’t help but grin through the conservatory window at the loathsome vegetables fused to their armchairs.

  I smelt it on Alex and Jamie’s clothes when they were teens. I saw it in their reddened eyeballs and dry lips. I watched them eat a loaf’s worth of toast and stretch themselves out on the sofa, playing Uno as though it were the funniest game in the world. I didn’t tell Lydia, didn’t want to give her the satisfaction that her kid was as wayward as she secretly hoped he’d be. I cornered Matthew instead, assuming or perhaps just deciding that he was responsible. He rebounded my lecture back at me with silent hatred.

  I sink lower on the bench, imagining that it is considerably more comfortable than it really is, and watch Paul, my room-neighbour, as he takes a slow, limping stroll round the garden. I smile fixedly at him, knowing that nothing I do will prevent him coming over to talk to me. The other residents have been drawn to me like iron filing slivers to a magnet since the last stroke, since my vocabulary shrank to a variation of grunts and open vowels, occasionally interspersed with short bursts of lucidity. My silence gives them free reign to wax on without interruption, safe in the knowledge I have little inclination to escape their presence and small chance of organising my tongue to interject. Paul creaks his way down next to me and lets out the practised elderly sigh of exhaustion.

  “Beautiful day,” he says.

  The sky to the east is full of billowing black clouds, the air sharp and cold, the grass churned up into a no man’s land of mud, cigarette ends and the occasional piece of cat shit.

  “Mmmm,” I agree.

  He sniffs, eyes me sideways. I take another drag.

  “Visitors for me, today,” he says.

  “Hum?”

  “Your boy coming later?”

  I shrug. I have little concept of what day it is any more. I wouldn’t blame Matthew if he took advantage of that fact and never came again.

  “Lovely to have your daughter working here, though,” he says.

  She’s not really my daughter, is my unspoken, automatic response. Just as well I can no longer speak these stupid thoughts - I am less hurtful without my voice. I lie with a nod. It’s not lovely at all. It’s intolerable having a constant witness to my deterioration.

  “She’s a sweet girl,” he says. “So attentive.”

  I vaguely recall shouting at her – something about seafood – and the way her eyes, which are just the wrong colour to be her mother’s eyes, looked back at me as if she were screaming: “I’m this close to giving up on you,” and then, worse: “But I won’t.”

  My vision begins to pick up colours that previously hadn’t appeared to be there. My body swells inside itself and I silently bless Ingrid and the kitchen boy, sinking into the sensation of my shoulders lowering in relaxation despite the wind and the hard back of the bench and the idiot keeping me company. This is what the Tai Chi fella should have given us.

  “Not like my Sharon,” Paul mutters.

  “Hmm?”

  “She won’t stop moaning about her Franklin. Honestly, if she’s going to worry about every little thing, is it any wonder he’s such a needy creature?”

  I close my eyes and bask in the angry warmth of Paul’s shift into phase two of the long march to death: exasperation and disgust and mass disapproval of, well, everything.

  Paul expostulates his vast and judgemental opinions about his whining daughter, his saintly son-in-law, their brattish child who he believes has been spoilt beyond all belief through their ‘modern parenting’, how things were so very different when his daughter was a baby, how Paul wouldn’t have put up with half of what she does.

  I nod, blow smoke rings, and call him a bastard inside my head. I might have ended up with the same pathetic point of view had Heather been around to raise Matthew, had I not lost my hand and ended up as a househusband while Lydia kept us afloat. I was the teacher, the comforter, the packed lunch maker, the organiser, cleaner, cook, wiper of arses and noses and taxi to appointments and clubs and children’s parties. I had to make the multitude of little decisions over how much to praise and how much to refuse and whose fault it was and who deserved what.

  I would discuss Alex’s po
tty training with the mums in the playground and they’d lean in and sigh at the tragedy of what they’d heard through the toddler group gossip - such a selfless and contemporary father, utterly devoted to his sons. Didn’t they wish their husbands were more like me? Didn’t they flirt and flatter and press themselves against me when they laughed? Ruffling the boys’ hair as if to ask, “Wouldn’t you like me to be your new mother?”

  I don’t know if I imagined this at the time or am making it up now. It doesn’t really matter. Paul eventually tails off his tirade and checks his watch, “Lunch in a bit. I wonder if it’s too late to call and tell them not to come today.”

  I flick my fag end into the bushes behind me and stand in a slow, wonderfully unbalanced way. My voice looses itself from my throat, spontaneously, with a lump of phlegm that I spit between my slippers. I ought to smoke this stuff more often. I turn and press down on his knees with a hand and a stump so my face is too close to his for him to look at me comfortably. “Let them come,” I tell him. “Be honest. Tell them what you really think. What can they do?”

  A twitching grin rips Paul’s face in two and he nods decisively. “I think I will. What can they do?”

  I choke down a laugh and meander back to the conservatory, leaving him on the bench to hatch an ungrateful, callous old plan. And maybe I should make one too - tell them all to stop pretending they’re not thinking about how my madness is affecting and disturbing and inconveniencing them and ask them how the hell they think I feel about it.

  #

  I have been staring into space for hours, just breathing. Thinking about not breathing. I think I might have swallowed glass. There must be a very small person sitting on my cheekbones, pushing a sharp stick through the backs of my eyeballs.

  I have been deposited in a line-up of comfortable chairs in the common room with the other cast-offs; an army of plastic soldiers made from a Quasimodo mould, stiff and frozen in a variety of unnatural positions. Backs are thrown up into humps by the tectonic plates of our twisted spines; arms wither to bone, loosely-wrapped in flaccid balloon-skin; faces grimace into pain, even when we’re smiling.