‘How are you and Wally feeling?’ Jack said, his hand on my thigh, his fingers moving. He’d taken to referring to us in this way. ‘We could go for a curry in the bay. It’s not that late?’
Jack was always suggesting things like this. They still felt decadent, naughty, to me, after an upbringing of Dad brewing his own beer to save money. Dad was fussy and frugal. He was forever using coupons. He liked to check his tyre pressures every single week, even though they were always the same, for no real reason at all – other than a relic from the seventies. Mum had been tolerant, for a while, and then frustrated. At her first hospital appointment, the first thing she said was that Dad would resent all the car parking fees during her treatment. He hadn’t, of course. But she was like that. Funny, but barbed, always aimed at Dad.
The lifestyle Jack and his family led; it was different. They would all still be up when we got back. Eating cheese and biscuits. Drinking wine. Ordering a film on Sky Box Office like it was Christmas all year round. They’d be jolly and happy. No acerbic remarks.
‘Okay,’ I said.
I turned the steering wheel, and my brain landed on Charlie’s name, like it had been rifling through the filing system of my mind ever since I shook the man’s hand in the changing room.
Charlie Masters. That man’s name was Charlie Masters. My curiosity piqued, I spoke up.
‘Do you work with him?’ I said, pointing back at the rugby club with my thumb.
Jack leant back against the passenger seat, looking at me childishly. ‘Imagine if we lived here,’ he said, looking out as the harbour lights whizzed by.
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘We’re like dual citizens.’
‘You, me and Wally?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Will he be Scottish or English?’ He smiled at me, his eyes dark in the dim light of the car.
Jack brought this up often. He’d extended and extended his job with City Lights, but we had to decide. We skirted around the issue, brought it up in moments like this: in cars or as we were walking into parties or right before sleep. Never at the right time.
‘Oban’s quiet. Plus, Scotland has free prescriptions,’ Jack said.
I couldn’t help but laugh at that: Jack was forever on antibiotics he didn’t need, having scans that weren’t warranted, getting referred to specialists he was frightened of.
‘True,’ I said lightly, my mind elsewhere. I left a beat, waiting for him to answer, but he didn’t. ‘So, Charlie?’ I said again, just as a car came up behind me, its headlights flashing brightly in my rear-view mirror before it overtook.
‘No, I just play rugby with him.’
I stayed silent, thinking. So what, Rachel? So his friend from the rugby club emailed him? I shook my head, trying to concentrate. I couldn’t ask about the email I’d accidentally read some of, so instead I asked about the nickname.
‘It seemed like you weren’t happy when I mentioned your nickname?’ I said.
‘Did it? Why?’ Jack said.
I liked that why? I settled back, comfortable against the seat. My curiosity was sated again.
‘Just – you had this look on your face …’
‘I was an idiot. A drunk young man. Riding in shopping trolleys. That sort of thing.’
‘Mmm,’ I said. It made sense. Would I really want him to know about the things I’d done as a teenager? How Audrey and I, in our halls of residence at nineteen years old, had performed an actual Wiccan spell when everyone else was out drinking? ‘I guess I’m with you there. I wasn’t a drinker, really. But I was a goon.’
‘I can’t imagine that,’ Jack said, flashing me a smile.
‘No?’
‘No, most definitely not. Coolest girl in town, you,’ he said, but his tone didn’t match his jovial words. It was tense. Frightened.
We didn’t speak for the rest of the journey after that.
6
One year ago
I was at home, the morning after a night shift, eating a risotto dinner, when the boy popped into my head and it occurred to me that I could look him up.
I had never looked up a patient before, but there was something about this case and this patient that felt different. I needed to know more about him.
He was easy to find on Twitter. The first hit.
‘#Lovinglyf,’ he had recently tweeted, with a photograph of his hospital tag. It had sixteen retweets; he had quite the following.
Ben appeared in the doorway. It was his morning and my night, like we were in different hemispheres. He sat down heavily next to me on the sofa, his stomach rounded where his T-shirt had ridden up. He smelt sour, of sleep.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked. I must have looked shifty. I tried to close the laptop without him seeing, but he picked it up and slid it on to his legs. We shared a computer, and he liked to read a gaming forum every morning. ‘What’s this?’ he said, scrolling down the screen. The boy had checked into my hospital on Foursquare, just a few posts before, and Ben raised his blond eyebrows. ‘Oh,’ he said. He turned to me in surprise. ‘Is this a patient?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Isn’t that … isn’t that not allowed?’
‘It’s public,’ I said with a defensive shrug, trying to finish my dinner.
‘You shouldn’t be looking at this,’ he continued, gesturing to a topless selfie the boy had posted, showing his hairless body. I used to have body hair, I swear, it was captioned. ‘Why are you looking?’ There was a note of derision in his voice.
‘I don’t know,’ I muttered. I didn’t try to explain. Mum had been diagnosed a few years ago. Perhaps it was that. Perhaps I wanted a window into the suffering, so I could try to understand it. Cure it.
‘I really don’t think you should be doing this,’ he said again, closing the laptop with a soft click.
I said nothing in response.
7
Present day
I decided to ask Jack about the email. It was more of a tidying-up exercise than anything. I just wanted to know it was nothing. Like doing a repeat blood test to clarify the problem had gone away when I knew that it had.
I didn’t ask him that evening in bed. The rooms were cold and echoey and we could even hear the clock ticking in his parents’ room, magnified by the stone and the emptiness.
And I didn’t ask him the next day, when we were walking his parents’ enormous dogs, Mozart and Sebastien, and we got left behind in the rain by everybody and were finally alone in a way we hadn’t been before in Oban.
I was constantly on the verge of asking, that weekend; annoying myself with opportunity spotting, and the way my stomach churned constantly, but I didn’t ask. I used to do the same with Ben, when I had been convinced he was cheating on me. I was always looking for openings. Rifling through his gym bag, wondering if I’d see a half-open packet of condoms. Peering over his phone at his text messages. Madness, he called it, and it was. Trust issues, Audrey had said sympathetically. Maybe it’s to do with your mum? she had added, and I had looked away, not able to meet her eyes. Because the thing was, Mum had died. And she hadn’t been who she said she was. All at once. All at the same time.
The Rosses’ house was vast, set right into the Scottish hills. From the outside, I expected Agas and throws on cosy sofas, real fires and wild gardens, but inside the house was different. It wasn’t cosy but neither was it modern. It was cold and shabby and dated, with a 1980s pink bathroom suite and a brown sofa that sagged at the back. There was a fine layer of dust almost everywhere, and it wouldn’t be uncommon to find dirty glasses back on the shelves. It wasn’t for lack of money. It was something else. A sort of snobbery. They wanted it to be unkempt, I thought. So it would feel properly old.
So in the end I did it while a toastie cooked in Jack’s parents’ enormous kitchen, late at night. It took three minutes.
His mum was passing in and out, carrying washing and banging the outside doors and organizing the shoe cupboard. They were all night owls.
‘I
actually missed you,’ Jack said to me as I arrived in the kitchen.
I’d just been in the shower, psyching myself up.
He was wearing jeans, no socks and a soft grey T-shirt. His bare feet made little slapping noises on the floor as he moved around the kitchen. ‘How ridiculous is that?’ He turned and looked at me. ‘Don’t come any closer,’ he said.
‘Oh, charming.’ I opened my mouth to ask him about the email. But then I stopped. I heard footsteps upstairs.
It was Davey. He was Jack’s younger brother. He had learning difficulties. He kept funny hours, emerged often in the afternoons. He liked space missions and playing World of Warcraft. He liked me, too, though I hardly ever saw him. He sometimes asked about my day, even though it seemed to make him nervous. He couldn’t communicate much about his own. When he did speak, it was in bursts: meandering, illogical, random.
‘Seriously, stay there,’ Jack said.
And that’s when I saw them, in a neat line across the orange-tiled kitchen floor. Little wooden boards with springs attached. Bright red Vs branded on them, a rat’s face in the centre of it. Victor, they said across them.
Traps.
‘Er …’ I didn’t know what to do. Dad had a spider catcher he used to rescue trapped house spiders and occasional bumblebees, freeing them outside, delicately.
‘We have a problem.’
‘With what?’ I said, though I already knew the answer.
‘Rats. Huge country rats.’ He grinned at me wolfishly. ‘Sorry. Gross, I know.’
‘Oh,’ I said. Audrey had a boyfriend once in our first year at university who kept two rats in a cage in his halls of residence. After she broke up with him, we called him Roland, after Roland Rat, and we laughed every time he walked by. Those were happy times, when we’d eat spaghetti hoops and moan about our workloads and paint our nails together. They seemed like a different lifetime.
‘It started with the flies.’
‘Flies?’
‘Yeah. There were about twenty flies in here the other day. Then they found a dead one – a rat – behind the fridge. So now we’ve got the traps down from the loft again. It happens at the end of every summer. Autumn time. Can’t stop them. Too many nooks and crannies. You block up one and they find another.’
I had never lived in the country, had spent my teenage years listening to the Metro and the city-centre buses rattle past. It was eerie, the misty Oban countryside. The thought of the dead rat languishing behind their fridge. The traps. That strange stone house.
‘Mum and Dad wait for me to come and lay them because they’re scared.’
‘You’re afraid of pectoral twitches but not of rats,’ I said.
‘Correct.’
Jack pulled out a fifth trap, opening and spreading it like a book, cracking its spine. He set it on the floor at my feet. ‘They’re nocturnal,’ he said.
‘What do they …?’ I pointed down at the traps.
‘They crush their skulls.’
He was standing, his weight back on his hips, surveying the traps. He nudged one with his foot. They all had blobs of something on them.
‘Peanut butter,’ Jack said, catching me looking. ‘They like it.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said, looking at the traps and imagining the scene in the morning. ‘Can’t you just …?’
Jack didn’t finish my sentence, or reach out to me, or console me. Instead, he was looking curiously at me.
‘I mean – you’re going to kill them.’ I wished I hadn’t been sidetracked in that way, diverted from my question about the email, but I was. I couldn’t help it.
‘Rach. We have no choice. There’ll be an infestation otherwise.’
‘Hmm.’ I couldn’t stop looking down at the traps, imagining the rats’ necks, cracked and broken by the morning. Would they die quickly or slowly? Would they see the other rats die first? Would they consider what the traps were; that they had been hunted and murdered?
‘It must be – it must be pregnancy hormones,’ I said. My voice caught in my throat. I was often feeling bewildered by my own emotions. It was a strange thing.
‘Oh no, no, don’t cry,’ Jack said. And he did reach for me then. One hand enveloped my waist, and the other crept up into my hair. His fingers were moving and I leant against his chest, my breathing immediately slowing. ‘Country life, eh?’ he said to me, softly, in my ear.
‘Brutal,’ I said. ‘For somebody awash with maternal hormones.’ I wondered briefly if my mother had felt like this. She had never seemed to. Never wanted to touch me, to hold me. She was always upright and stiff. I’ll never forget the moment when she died, and she reached for my hand. Hers was cool and bony, but I liked the feel of it. Her grip in mine.
‘Mmm,’ Jack said, a long-drawn-out sympathetic noise in my ear.
We stood there, in the dim kitchen light, surrounded by the rat traps, for ages.
‘Do you want me to stop? I’ll stop, if you like,’ he said.
He would have done anything for me.
‘No,’ I said.
‘The last time I was doing this, last autumn, I was single,’ he murmured.
‘And now you’re about to have a family.’
‘Yep,’ he said easily, a wide grin spreading across his face. ‘Can’t believe my bloody luck.’ He put the bread and the cheese in the toastie maker.
‘You’re such a goon,’ I said, though inside I was delighted. ‘Ever heard of playing it cool?’
‘I can’t. Not with you.’
And then Jack’s mum, Cynthia, shouted through that he needed to feed the dogs, and I asked right then, as his back was to me. He was holding a bag of dog food, and the dogs were padding impatiently. They seemed to know to avoid the traps. He kept up a steady stream of dialogue with them. ‘This evening, sirs, we are having a consommé of reconstituted beef with a side of cardboard biscuits,’ he said. ‘Will sirs be having wine?’ The dogs looked at him, and he turned to me and smiled, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to banter.
‘I saw something on your iPad,’ I said. ‘When we were in bed, the other weekend. There was an email … from Charlie Masters.’ I couldn’t bring myself to say atrocity.
The dogs’ eyes shifted to me as I spoke. They were silent. Watchful.
Jack was looking at them, too. ‘I wanted cats,’ he said, gesturing to them. ‘Dogs are just so …’
I didn’t say anything.
‘… so simple. Look at them,’ he said with a grin, as their eyes followed his hands. ‘All they care about is food. Cats care about philosophy.’
I couldn’t help but laugh at him. He laughed too, ignoring my question.
I tried again. ‘So – that email?’
I was watching Jack closely, but there was nothing to see. He didn’t blush or stammer. His hand didn’t still. He didn’t drop the dog food or turn away from me.
‘Yeah?’ He bent down and started filling the bowls.
Mozart licked Jack’s hand, leaving a tiny damp stain on his fingertip. Jack tutted, then ran a hand down Sebastien’s spine. Mozart pushed his face into the bag, and Jack laughed.
And then his black eyes were on me.
‘I – I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it,’ I said. The thoughts emerged in a rush, tumbling over each other like lemmings falling off a cliff. ‘I just wondered … it said something about Douglas having done something?’
‘Matt Douglas is our old friend,’ Jack said. ‘He assaulted someone. Punched them. Outside a bar.’
‘Oh. Really?’ I said, but already I could feel the tension ebbing out of my shoulders and neck.
‘Yeah. It was weird.’ He stood up straight, putting the dog food away.
I caught a waft of Olbas Oil – he had an autumn cold – and the sweet smell made me momentarily pause, remembering dotting it on to my pillow when I was a child. It always made my eyes water. Kate hated the scent of it in our shared bedroom.
‘It mentioned an atrocity,’ I said. ‘In that email. Strong wor
d.’ And Charlie apologized, I thought to myself, for dredging up your history.
‘It was pretty violent,’ Jack said, turning the sides of his mouth down and giving a little shrug. ‘It escalated. This lad glassed Matt, so Matt punched him. Too hard. Fractured his skull.’
‘Why did Charlie email it to you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jack said. ‘We keep an eye on the articles, I guess.’
‘It said sorry. About bringing it up. History.’
‘Yeah. It was – not very nice. That time. For any of us.’
The apology didn’t mean it had been about him, I reasoned. And yet: the email had said your history.
I tried not to watch him too closely, but it was fascinating. He didn’t seem to care. It seemed mundane, to him. Either that or he was an absolutely excellent liar. His face was entirely neutral, impassive. And yet I couldn’t stop remembering how his expression had closed down when he first read it. Perhaps I had imagined that?
He stroked Mozart’s head, looked at me quickly, then smiled. And then the toastie was ready – the smell of the melted cheese made me feel sick; a relic of the first trimester – and in a moment the conversation would move on. I could feel it, like a boat slowly pulling away from the shore. The ropes were running through my fingers the further away we moved, and soon we’d be too far out for me to bring it back up again. So that’s what made me say it. I threw the anchor overboard, stalling us.
‘But it was nothing to do with you, then?’ I said with a forced laugh. ‘You weren’t involved?’ I couldn’t help but ask.
As I spoke, Jack turned slowly to me. The bread burned his fingers and he dropped it abruptly on to the waiting plate. I was showing him my hand, with that sentence, but he ignored it.
‘Bed?’ he replied.
He wasn’t going to answer. Not a word. It didn’t need an answer, did it? My rhetorical question, my poor joke.
The pause yawned and yawned. He might have told me it wasn’t awkward, but it was. I knew it in the same way I knew what sort of time it was when I woke up. And when a patient was about to arrest. I knew it. Deep inside me. Jack was busying himself, not looking at me again.
Everything but the Truth Page 4