White Lies
Page 21
I can hear the nurses discussing me in low tones, wisps of whispers that fall into my ears. They think my off switch has been flicked. “God, it’s heartbreaking, really.”
“Why doesn’t Angela tell him?”
“She has, he doesn’t remember.”
“She should tell him the truth.”
“Would you? Again and again?”
“I just can’t believe he doesn’t know.”
It is as if I am lying in the wreck of a car, listening to the battered radio spew out travel reports about how my twisted body is holding up the evening commute by so many miles of gridlocked traffic. I am paralysed by the sight of my hand. How much would the other have diverged in the mapping of my existence? What might have been and what was. What does a missing hand signify? What else am I missing? I swallow down thick mucus with a thud and realise it’s the other way around: what did I never have in the first place?
Chapter Twenty-Five
Third beer. Concussion is winning. Graham is skinny and shrunken and unfamiliar. He watches me across the kitchen worktop until I break the anti-social spell. “My brother died,” I say. I can say it now, without feeling like I’ve been kicked in the nuts.
He nods. “I heard. I’m so sorry.”
Graham’s kitchen is a mirror image of how ours used to be, back to front, but the same orange-lacquer on the cabinet fronts, the same fake marble lino. Memories of my childhood home slide into place, overlaid with someone else’s possessions. “My brother died.” This time it makes me cry. I’ve cried more this afternoon than I’ve done since I was a whining nine-year-old being bullied by my five-year-old brother.
Graham pats the worktop in a gentle rhythm and it’s strangely soothing. When it becomes evident I’m not going to stop sniffling he turns to stuff a new liner into the bin and washes his hands, slow and thorough, staring out into the darkness of the garden. He’s probably a decade younger than my dad, but looks as if he would snap if you high-fived him. He takes down a couple of tumblers from a cupboard and polishes them with a tea towel before clinking them together and nodding at the beer.
“Enough left for a toast?” he says.
I scrub my wet face on my wet sleeve. “What for?”
He shrugs. “To Alex.”
I slide the remaining cans over the counter. Let’s be civilised about this. Why the fuck not?
Graham sips the cheap beer, grimaces, and puts his glass down purposefully. “I heard about Peter.” Then: “Your dad,” like I wouldn’t know who he meant.
“What about him?”
“That he’s losing it.”
I nod. That’s about it.
We drink. It’s comfortably uncomfortable, somehow. There are no questions of what I am doing with my life, about Angela or Clare or any details of my brother’s death or why I had been standing outside his house. He wipes away something invisible on the counter and exhales more air than could possibly be in his lungs with one long whistling stream.
“Peter did the same as you a few years ago,” he gestured to my left, to the front door. “Staring up at his old house, drinking on the curb. I didn’t invite him in though.” Graham shakes his head as if he’s forgotten what he meant to say. “I should have moved. I should have left. But… ” he swept his arms loosely around the dark kitchen. “This is home.”
I don’t know what he means. Was living next to us so awful? “Dad wasn’t a very good neighbour,” I try a smile. “Don’t take it personally. He hates everyone.” But that’s not quite true. He reserved a special flavour of loathing for some people. The first time I heard Dad swear was about Graham. “That bastard next door.” It became an epithet - forged so long before my comprehension that I never really questioned it, though it seemed at odds with how Graham was to me and the other kids. He’d looked after us a few times after Lydia went into hospital. He had no children of his own but he brought a box of Lego and an Atari down from the attic and we gawped and punched the air with hissing yeses before ignoring him completely for the rest of the evening. Contended and ungrateful. He tried to send us home with the toys but my Dad left them on his doorstep and muttered about pity and charity and not accepting anything from that bastard next door.
“He had his reasons to be angry,” Graham says. I don’t get it. The alcohol flares up some suppressed ember of hatred and I can’t stop shaking my head. My dad has been a monolith of fear and resentment and uncertainty my whole life and I haven’t stopped trying to gain his approval even though it should mean nothing. He doesn’t deserve to approve of me.
“Why should he be allowed to be such an arsehole when we all have to try to be decent people? Why is he the exception?” I go to pour out the rest of my can but it’s empty. Graham slides his glass into my hand.
“I thought maybe he’d died when I saw you out there,” he mutters. Chance would be a fine fucking thing. The words settle behind my tongue, unsaid, but I fail to feel any guilt. Instead I say, “Not yet.”
“Did you ever…?” Graham stops, falters, twists his face around the question and finishes with a grimace. “Ever hear from your mother? Ever find out what happened to her?”
The question is a slap on drunken cheeks. “No.” But Dad did. My voice resolves into an edge. “Why?”
Graham tries not to look at me but can’t help taking little nibbling glances while he waits for me to stop staring threateningly back. “I just wondered. It was all just so sad,” he says. There are no tears from him but I can tell they’re there, behind puckered old eyelids and circular glasses and I can’t tell why my mum’s disappearance can still make him want to cry, when all I have is fury.
“You knew her, you tell me why she left,” I hear myself say - words I’ve wanted to scream in my father’s face, a question I’ve not asked since I was a child.
Graham bares his teeth in an odd, restrained expression - holding back, holding in, holding onto something. “Your father knows, I’m sure.”
“You think? He can’t even remember that Alex is dead.”
“Matthew. I’m almost as old as he is and there are plenty of things I’ve forgotten. Your mother - she’s not one of them. Your father can’t have forgotten either.”
I was wrong, he looks older than my dad. Sadder. Sorrier. Knocked down and reversed over again. I down the rest of my drink. He smiles a pathetic smile at me and I feel like I owe him something. “She sent him letters,” I say, and his eyes snap up to drill into mine.
“What did you say?” he whispers.
“I found a stack of them, in Dad’s room.” Before he asks the inevitable, I tell him: “I don’t know what they said. But it means he’s lied to me my whole fucking life.”
There is water in his eyes now. His chin trembles and saliva stretches between his lips as he lets out a strangled sort of cry. He reaches across the counter to hold my hands and his skin is warmer than I think it’s going to be. Not a zombie. Softer. Infinitely more human in the last few minutes than my Dad has been in years.
“Matthew, I’m sorry,” he says, taking two steps around the counter and sliding his arms around my neck. “I’m so sorry.” He pulls me into his chest with more strength than he should possess, and he is crying the way I should be able to about Alex. About my mother. About my dying, demented dad. I hug him back and he smells like all the things that were lost when Dad moved into the home.
#
I am as drunk as I am tired and I shouldn’t be driving. I take the backstreets, stay below twenty and lean into the windscreen as though it might help my eyes to focus. There is a plastic bag on the passenger seat that makes me cry every time it catches my peripheral vision. Inside the bag is a collection of envelopes. Inside the envelopes are pictures. And inside the photos are images of me as a baby, as a toddler, as a preschooler. All the ones missing from Dad’s albums. Ones he threw away. Tried to burn. Pictures Graham found on the street, apparently, and squirrelled away in place of a family of his own. He pressed the bag into my chest when I left.
#
I have thirty-six missed calls. For about a mile I was convinced the car was going to explode until I realised it wasn’t the engine rattling but an angry phone locked in a glovebox. Clare, Sarah, Angela, Sabine, the nursing home and round and round again, backed up with answerphone messages that I don’t listen to and texts that I don’t look at.
If the drive sobered me at all, the cold walk to my flat sends a fresh flow of heaviness into my blood. I need to sleep and forget everything.
A couple stand arguing outside the entrance to my block of flats but instead of ignoring me and carrying on as I weave around the corner, they both stop mid-sentence and take an aggressively synchronised step towards me. It’s fine, they can mug me, beat me, whatever. I don’t care anymore.
“Matt?” the man says.
“Where have you been?” the woman says.
I know their voices, I don’t need to look out from under my hood to see their faces.
“Fuck off,” I reply.
Sabine shoves her palms into my shoulders. “Matt, where the fuck have you been?”
“We’ve been trying to call,” Jamie says. He doesn’t shove me but his stance tells me he wants to.
“Fuck. Off.”
I try to push past them to the stairs but Sabine pulls at my coat and Jamie blocks my way. “Have you heard from Clare?” Sabine asks.
“She’s not answering her phone either,” Jamie says.
“Matt?”
“Have you seen her?”
“Not since this morning,” I say, watching them both shrink a few inches. My hands are still in my pockets and my fingers close around my phone in reflexive memory. “She’s been calling me though… ”
“For fuck’s sake, Matt!” Jamie’s voice is hoarse and I can’t collate the reasons for urgency together with my soft, diluted brain.
“Call her back,” Sabine demands.
“Why do you care where my niece is?” I ask them both, emphasising the possession.
Jamie sort of collapses forwards with his elbows against the wall, his hands clawing at his face. “She came over to mine this morning and we had a fight. She left and now she won’t answer her phone.”
“She fucking what?”
He avoids my eyes but I grab one of his hands and tear it away from his face. “Why was Clare at yours?”
Sabine pries the phone from my fist and presses redial on Clare’s number.
Jamie doesn’t reply but I still have him by the wrist and I smack him in the forehead with his own hand like we’re at school again, chanting: stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself. “What the fuck is going on with you two?”
He sort of growls. I make him hit himself again. A few more times. He hunches back against the wall and for the first time in our lives I am the fucking alpha, but instead of feeling satisfied I am just exhausted.
Sabine pokes the screen of my phone angrily. “She’s not picking up.”
Jamie’s hand isn’t hitting hard enough. I lift my free fist and he slides down a few inches. “It’s mine,” he says. “The baby’s mine.”
Sabine’s mouth freezes half open.
“Jesus,” I say. “That’s just fucking perfect.”
“She’s nineteen!” Sabine shouts at him, then turns on me, gesturing viciously with my phone, “Did you know she was pregnant?”
I nod. Jamie gives me a loathing look. I send him one back. “I’ve been looking after her. What the fuck have you been doing? Punching random old men in the face. Getting teenagers pregnant. What the fuck, Jamie? When did it happen?”
He rubs at his forehead, readjusts his hair absent-mindedly. “I was starting my PhD. She was in her second year. It wasn’t a one-off,” he says quietly, then remembers to glare at me. “She didn’t want to tell you because you hate me.”
“Yeah, I do,” It’s too late for guilt trips. “What did you fight about? Where did she go?”
He returns to the face clawing. “I said I was going to tell her mum about it. She went mental at me and stormed out. You need to get hold of her, see if she’s okay. Please?”
Sabine strides towards me and thrusts my phone into my stomach and I enjoy Jamie’s flinch as she passes him. “Listen to your messages,” she says.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Whistler died today. I watched her fold in two from across the hall. For once the machines didn’t beep.
Something has sprung a leak. Water seeps beneath my closed door with a head of dirty foam. The bubbles burst lazily as they reach the foot of my armchair, leaving white scum across my toes. Every so often the shingle turns over an empty mussel shell, a tiny crab fighting its way to the surface of the carpet, a faded old crisp packet. Outside my window, seagulls fight over scraps, beaks tipped with red, eyes wild and piercing.
She knocks on my door and I nod my acquiescence. She waits for the seventh wave to build, the largest in the pattern, before she gently pushes her way in. The water soaks me up to my knees and trickles down between my legs to pool in my crotch. A flurry of seaweed rushes in behind her – the kind made of smooth rubbery pustules with fronds like a Celtic tattoo – and it settles itself in eye-watering complexity on top of the already over-designed carpet.
“Morning, lover,” Heather says. Her mouth is full of sand. She’s never spoken to me like that before. I nod again. She’s beautiful. I must have forgotten quite how beautiful she always was. She hears my thoughts and smiles, grit stuck between her teeth.
“I miss you,” is my counter-offer.
“No, you don’t,” she says, laughing, but not amused, “you’re confused.”
A nurse passes my doorway but doesn’t glance in. The taint of sewage hangs in the air; a pipe set too near the shore. I used to let the kids swim here.
“I still have your letters,” I tell her, hoping they’re safe from the seawater in their shoebox under the bed.
“Burn them,” Heather says. She is the deity of wrath and I am afraid. “I don’t want Matthew to see them.”
“I’ve kept enough from him.”
“They’re dangerous, Peter. A letter killed your other son.”
The wind picks up and the spray becomes tiny splinters of glass, flying sideways, embedding themselves deep into my skin. She takes a step forward. Seaweed capsules pop under her feet.
“Burn them,” she orders.
“You blame me, don’t you?” I say, and can’t keep the aggression out of my voice, can’t help the injustice making me turn a plum purple, holding my breath like a petulant child until she answers.
“You don’t think I should?”
I splutter, spitting out empty exclamations of “Puh! Puh! Buh!” until I feel a rubber band snap in my head. Snowstorm static invades my vision and my face begins to melt.
Heather’s vein-riddled hands reach up to her frozen, eternal face. Her skin has turned translucent from the fluid beneath. She blinks once, twice, then takes out her eyes – pops them clean out of their sockets – and holds out her hand to me. They lie moist and shining in her palm and I forget how to breathe and a seventh stroke runs its way down the right side of my body and urine runs down my right leg.
She leans forward and places her eyeballs in my hand.
“Try seeing things from my perspective,” she says.
#
My brain starts shutting doors, closing up for the night -switching off appliances and lights and rolling down the shutters. My body shivers like a furious Jack Russell.
Heather sees her demand through. She sits on the bed and rolls me cigarette after cigarette using the browning letters she sent me thirty-something years ago. They burn faster than Rizla, taste like dirt and coal fires, make my eyes water until I can’t tell if I’m weeping or bleeding.
Her eyeballs rest in my lap, watching me smoke away the proof. I run out of tobacco the letter before last, toking down the word ‘Heather’ in one painful breath. And then she is gone.
I cough until I vomit - bloody and thick with mucus. I stumble through the seaweed to shut the door behind her, to seal the doorway for good, sobbing into the little plastic sign that tells me where to find my nearest fire exit. There is salt on my fingertips, grimy tidelines on the furniture, but the water has disappeared.
There’s something in my pocket, in my fist. My palm spasms open and I feel paper wrinkle itself outwards again, like a time-lapse flower in bloom. I smooth out the final letter, tracing the indents of her pen, the confession I wished she’d never posted.
Through the door I can hear the nurses clattering around Mother Whistler as they disconnect her robot counterparts and I have to force myself not to charge out and stop them, from gathering the old skeleton up in my arms and singing her a lullaby. Poor Whistler. Poor Ingrid. Poor Alex.
The shoebox sits on the bed, malicious and innocuous. I’m certain I didn’t put it there. It’s only three paces away – only two medium steps to reach my little box of palpitations – but it takes at least twenty to get there. The shoebox is empty of paper but full of tablets.
The letter in my pocket is the last test. It holds all the answers to Matthew’s incessant questions and Angela’s do-gooder prodding and Alice’s chirpy Christian mourning. The anger I’ve tended to all these years flames into guilt and tastes like chalk on my dry tongue.
I unfold the soft paper. Age has turned it to the texture of brushed cotton. I read the lines one more time and tear it into eight neat pieces along the well-folded edges. It dissolves in my mouth like sugar-paper. The pulp soothes my scorched throat as it goes down, pushing the lump of grief along with it. I manipulate Heather’s eyeballs in my palm like Chinese meditation balls.
When I have swallowed down her dirty little secret I reach for the shoebox and its jumble of pills, to take my headache and my hallucinations and the stickiness of my palms far away.