White Lies

by Mark O'Sullivan

  ‘He’s going to die,’ I cried. ‘And he’ll never know I came back.’

  ‘Nance, get a doctor,’ Seanie said. ‘And an ambulance. It’s his heart.’

  Seanie was kneeling on the bed and ripping the pyjama top from Jimmy’s chest. I couldn’t take any more. On all fours, I got myself onto the landing. I was wailing, scream ing, begging for forgiveness, beating my head against the wall, telling Jimmy I’d get his trumpet, pleading with him not to go.

  Then the house came alive with people rushing up and down the stairs and Nance picked me up from the landing floor, where I’d rolled myself into a ball in the corner.

  ‘He’s going to be all right, OD,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to go in the ambulance with him.’

  I was like a zombie. I couldn’t talk. All I could do was follow her down the steps. Seanie was at the door, his hair wet with sweat. I grabbed his hand. It was all I could do to thank him. Nance brought me out to the ambulance; as I climbed in, she said, ‘When you get home, call up to my house. No matter how late it is, right?’ Through the wash of my tears she seemed to be fading away.

  ‘Seanie was right,’ she said. ‘I never stopped loving you. Maybe – ’

  A nurse rushed up the steps into the ambulance beside me and pulled in the doors. I talked to Jimmy all the way over, even though he was unconscious and covered with an oxygen mask. Maybe the nurse thought I was mad, but I’m sure she’d seen it all before. Plans for him, plans for me. Getting his trumpet, finding a bunch of old rockers like himself, going on the road again – ‘no drink, mind, Jimmy!’ – and some new gear – ‘maybe even a black velvet suit, what do you think, Jimmy?’ And me. Back to the books, to school, keep the head down, and writing – ‘I’m no Dylan Thomas, but I have something, I know it, Jimmy! Seanie said it, Nance said it.’ Nance – ‘Could it be, Jimmy? Could we start over, me and Nance? Me and you?’

  I tried so hard but I still believed it was all my fault. Until some time, hours later, when the sky outside the hospital waiting room was already brightening and a white-coated doctor came and asked me a whole bunch of questions about Jimmy. At first I was angry with him because my lack of answers showed me how little I’d cared about Jimmy this last while.

  ‘When was the last time your father drank alcohol? Did he eat regularly? Did you notice any disorientation? His balance, his …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I did,’ I said. ‘So? Why are you asking me all these things? Is it serious or not?’

  The doctor, a young man, had probably seen it all too. He waited for me to calm down before he went on.

  ‘Your father is going to be fine, thanks to that young chap – Sean, is it?’ he said. ‘I’m trying to confirm the diagnosis, the reasons why your father suffered this … this trauma.’

  I hid my face from him.

  ‘I know why. I did it to him. I –’

  ‘Your father’s heart attack was brought on by malnutrition. I’m wondering why … why he might have stopped eating. We can’t find a physical reason.’

  Malnutrition! The word didn’t seem to belong at the end of the twentieth century, not in Ireland, not unless you had a cause like Bobby Sands had, not for a damned trumpet. Then I knew that sometimes even a knocked-up trumpet is worth going to the edge for. It was with a strange mixture of relief and deep, deep sadness that I looked up at him.

  ‘For a trumpet. For me.’

  At around seven in the morning, the hospital came to life slowly with the rattle of trolleys and the squeak of nurses’ rubber soles reverberating in the big green-painted corri dors. They brought me some tea and toast but I couldn’t touch the toast. I asked for a phone and just after eight I rang Seanie’s house to thank him properly. He answered quickly but his voice seemed tired.

  ‘OD here,’ I said. ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘We haven’t been to bed,’ he said. ‘How’s Jimmy?’

  ‘They haven’t let me see him yet but he’s fine, they said. If it hadn’t been for you, Seanie …’

  Then it twigged with me what he’d just said about not getting to bed.

  ‘You’ve been talking to your folks? About … about it.’

  ‘Yeah, I tried anyway.’

  ‘It didn’t go too well?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  I didn’t know what to tell him. The whole thing was too strange to me; and to be honest, in spite of what he’d done for Jimmy, I felt uncomfortable even talking to him. Which was totally out of line. He deserved better and I knew it.

  ‘Seanie? Remember the poem I wrote?’ I said, ‘Well, there’s a second verse. And the standing stones learn to speak. Some of them, anyway.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, OD,’ he said.

  ‘I hope so too, Seanie.’

  ‘By the way, St. Peter’s lost their game. We won the League.’

  It didn’t seem to matter much. Not to him, not to me. I didn’t have long more to wait to see Jimmy. At the door of the Intensive Care ward, the nurse whispered, ‘Five minutes. We don’t want to tire him out.’ I opened the door and went inside. To my father.

  NANCE

  I opened the door and went inside. To my mother. The unlocked door seemed to offer the possibility of a new beginning. But not until I’d heard the end of our story and the silence between us was over. Her room was colder than the street outside. In the small light from the bedside lamp I could see that her dark hair was a mess and her eyes were red and heavy. I thought about sitting on the bed but, instead, I sat on the chair alongside it. She was looking up at me like a small animal whose trapper has come to finish her off.

  From downstairs, I heard the unexpected noises of Tom pottering about. I hadn’t seen him when I came in and thought he’d gone to bed in the spare room. I heard the loud rushing sound of the central heating coming on and I knew that whatever happened between May and me in the next while, he was determined to get things back to normal in our house again. The clatter of pans and crockery from the kitchen confirmed that feeling. He couldn’t have known how wonderful those ordinary sounds seemed to me – even if it was the middle of the night.

  ‘You’ll always hate me now, Nance,’ May said. I was taken aback at hearing her echo OD’s words.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ I assured her. ‘I just want to understand why you didn’t tell me. Or why Tom didn’t.’

  May sat up warily, raised her knees and wrapped her arms tightly around them.

  ‘It’s not Tom’s fault,’ she said. ‘He wanted to tell you long ago but I wouldn’t let him. I thought, if I could carry this … this burden for you, then you’d get by without ever having to know. You must believe me, Nance, I’d make any sacrifice for you, even denying I was your natural mother.’

  She squeezed her arms tighter about her knees and then released her grip. She leaned back on the pillows.

  ‘It seems so stupid now. I know it probably won’t even make sense to you. I was afraid of what other people would think of me, of what my mother would have thought of me if she’d ever known.’

  I’d never met her mother. She’d died shortly after May and Tom came back from Kenya. She didn’t talk about her very much but when she did, it was always with a sadness I thought I understood.

  ‘I was all ready to tell her everything. But when we got back home she was dying from cancer. Tom pushed me to do it, almost too hard. We very nearly split up over it. When my mother died and I hadn’t told her, I felt I could never tell anyone.’

  ‘Tell me about Chris,’ I said, trying hard not to feel bad about being seen as just ‘anyone’.

  She swallowed a mouthful of air and her eyelids trembled as she struggled to form words.

  ‘Nance, it wasn’t anything to do with the fact that … that I’d had a child before I married or that your father was black. It wasn’t those things at all. Chris was a good man, really. He just went wrong, awfully wrong.’

  The radiator was knocking and the room was heating up. But the chill was still seeping into my bones. I had never fel
t so cold. What she said next sounded as if she’d re hearsed it during those long days when we weren’t talking to each other. There was no confused rambling or uncer tainty. She told her story as precisely as she painted her watercolours, but she had never painted a landscape as harshly realistic as this.

  ‘We had been going out just two months when I got pregnant. Soon as we found out, we knew we’d have to leave our teaching jobs in Nairobi, that’s how it was then. But we were going to get married and he was looking for a job up north. At least, I thought he was. But after you were born he’d appear for a day or two and then he’d be gone. It didn’t take long for me to realise what was wrong. I’d seen the signs when I worked a summer in the States in ’76. We argued and he left. I thought I’d never see him again. Oh, God!’

  ‘He was on drugs?’ I gasped. ‘Those Americans in the photo …?’

  ‘They came along just when Chris was at his lowest. He couldn’t get a job and some of his family were giving him a hard time over me. Annie and Doug, they were touring Africa – or touring the drug scene of Africa, more like. They ended up in Morocco, but not before they destroyed Chris.’

  Her hand reached for the bedside lamp and she switched it off. Even though the curtains were open, it took some time before I could begin to see the outline of her face again. In all that time, she never spoke. Below us, Tom was still busy, but I wondered if there was any point. And, in my mind, I was making some kind of connection between Chris and OD – a connection I didn’t like. Her voice surprised me in the dark because it had become stronger.

  ‘Months passed and Chris never showed,’ she said. ‘I was completely lost. I’d no idea what I was going to do. Heather put us up and fed us. Then Tom arrived on the scene. He and Heather were at the same school and they started going out. We, you and I, we moved to Mombasa. I’d got a secretarial job there. But it was hotter there, more humid, and you were always sick. Eventually the company gave me a job in Nairobi and we went back. Then I got to know Tom.’

  It was becoming more and more painful for her, but I was afraid to move closer. The rhythm of her speech slowed like a train when it approaches its station.

  ‘We seemed to click straight off. It wasn’t a question of me setting out to steal him from her. We were just right for each other and Heather knew it. She was furious, and I couldn’t blame her. I even tried to break it off with Tom, but he wouldn’t have it. He went to the airport the night Heather was leaving but she wouldn’t talk to him. That was the night it all happened … the worst night of our lives. A nightmare, Nance, a nightmare.’

  She paused. The train had reached its destination. A place darker than the room we were in.

  ‘Even as I let Chris in to the house I knew there was going to be trouble. His eyes were dead and wild at the same time. He wanted to see you. You’d just started walking and you were under the table playing some little game.’

  It was a nightmare all right. My nightmare. And my nightmare was true. It might have been someone else’s story now, she sounded so detached. I suppose it was the only way she could get through the hard bit.

  ‘We screamed and shouted at each other for I don’t know how long, and then the door crashed open. It was Tom.’

  It all made sense now, all those terrifying noises in my dream. I began to sweat as heavily as I did when that dream came, but I couldn’t stir myself to take off my coat and scarf.

  ‘Tom got him out to the landing, but Chris got the better of him and pushed him over the stair rails. He broke his femur, that’s why he has that limp. Chris was driving away from Nairobi when the car crashed. It was instant, they told us; he didn’t have to suffer any more.’

  My father, a junkie, almost a murderer. I was devastated. I felt unclean. I felt like a stone. May was crying again.

  ‘Nance, I’ll never forget poor Chris’s face before he ran. It was the old Chris, the real Chris. He looked like he’d woken from a nightmare and couldn’t understand what had happened to him, what he’d done. He was in such pain, he was suffering so much I was glad … it’s a terrible thing to say … but I was glad his life ended then, that his suffering was over.’

  ‘Why did you keep the photo, May?’ I asked.

  ‘Because that was the last good day we had together, the last day of our … love.’

  May folded up then. She was so small and vulnerable, under the bedcovers, that I couldn’t bear it. I went to the bed and, with a huge effort – part of me hated her for destroying the father in my mind and part of me loved her for loving him – I held on to her.

  We stayed that way for so long that my arm, cradling her head, went numb and when Tom came upstairs and tapped lightly on the door, I was glad. For the first time in weeks, we were together. I told them about Jimmy but I left out the rest. That was OD’s business, OD’s wreckage, OD’s secret. We had ours. Some day maybe they’d know, but not now. Though I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to live with what I knew, I was happy to have my family back again. And OD. Yes, OD had gone some way along that road that had led Chris to his doom, but he’d crawled from the wreckage. The road goes on to a place beyond the wreck age and if OD stayed on that road, I’d walk with him.

  There would be worlds for us to discover out there. New worlds, old worlds, the world of Kenya and the Samburu among them – not a perfect world but nonetheless part of what I am. May and Tom, for reasons that were in the end unselfish, had kept that world from me; but I’d kept myself from it too, for too long. Now I was hungry for knowledge of it and hungry for the future.

  Morning came and we let the new day settle in for a while before we moved on. Tom went downstairs to cook us a fry. The smell of rashers, sausages and eggs filled the house and the sound of a Sunday morning radio blasted us back to normality. Then the front doorbell rang. It was OD. Tom must have known because he let me answer it.

  ‘He’s going to make it, Nance,’ OD said.

  ‘I’m glad.’

  We stood staring at each other. I knew he’d been up all night too but he looked rested, easy. Behind me, Tom emerged from the kitchen, his sleeves rolled up, his face red and healthy from the heat of the kitchen.

  ‘I’m doing breakfast for the ladies, OD,’ he said. ‘Would you care to join us?’

  OD glanced uncertainly at me. Then he smiled.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘If you only knew how hungry I am!’