‘He hates me and we cause a family rift and everyone needs therapy,’ Jack had said immediately. He’d then looked at me, sheepish. ‘Sorry. I’m too good at worst-case scenarios.’
‘You are,’ I had agreed.
‘I mean – you are it,’ he’d said. ‘And the pressure …’
‘What do you mean “I am it”?’ I’d said, though a smile was beginning to slide over my features.
He had looked at me directly. ‘I am so … I have never …’
‘What?’
‘I’m so in love with you. It’s insane,’ he’d said, bringing his hands up in front of him. ‘I know I sound like a complete prat, but there it is.’
I smiled now at the memory, watching him nod earnestly at my dad.
‘They’ve got all sorts of plans,’ Jack said. ‘Oban tours. The lot.’ He was drumming his fingers nervously on the table.
‘Best take your walking trousers,’ Kate said with a smile.
It was our favourite family story – that once, Dad bought walking trousers that zipped off at the knee, and only bought three-quarters of them. He had to go back to Matalan for the last shin, much to our amusement. They didn’t make me pay for it, but I did have to present my Matalan card, he’d said proudly.
‘Want to come?’ I said to Kate. I threw her a meaningful look.
We were trying to ensure Dad didn’t feel like a single parent; that he wasn’t alone too much.
‘Hell, yes,’ she said, lining up the counters and getting the dice out. ‘I want to watch this weird parental blind date play out,’ she added, which made me laugh.
One of Kate’s long-standing obsessions was people. She loved to people watch. The tennis world was brilliant for pop psychology, she’d once said.
‘You’re like the disgraced sister,’ she said.
‘Disgraced?’
‘Yeah, you know. Illegitimate, accidental child and all of that.’ Her gaze travelled to my stomach.
I knew she was only joking.
The thing was, we told everyone it was an accident, but it wasn’t. I was a doctor. It was 2.5 per cent. That was the percentage chance of pregnancy on a one-off: too high if you didn’t want to get pregnant. But nevertheless, we weren’t stupid, or reckless. We decided.
Jack’s tongue was on my thigh back in June; the longest day of the year. The sky was still a pale pink outside, even though it was past ten thirty. The night was warm, Jack’s breath hot and ticklish. We should’ve stopped. He murmured about condoms but we were all out.
And so I said the thing I’ll always remember. The thing that made Wally: ‘A baby with you wouldn’t be the worst thing.’ I had loved him so much, it had felt like it was overflowing inside me.
Jack had moved up my body, met my eyes. ‘I entirely agree,’ he had said.
That was that.
No, we weren’t stupid. Or maybe we were, but not in the way people thought.
‘Illegitimate. I’ll have to marry her, then,’ Jack said, reaching over and taking my hand.
Kate grinned at me across the table. I could see the happiness on her face, in the raise of her eyebrows, in the way her broad smile showed her bottom and top rows of teeth excitedly.
Jack loved me. That much was obvious. It was so simple; he was so simple in his love for me.
‘Mum would’ve liked you,’ Dad said, raising his glass to Jack, and I felt happiness bloom across my chest.
‘Right,’ Kate said, smiling. She pulled a question out, and fired it at Jack. ‘Mr Ross …’
‘We haven’t even started yet,’ I said, trying to snatch the card from her hand.
‘Mr Ross,’ she said, dodging me. ‘History, geography …’
‘The yellow ones,’ he said. ‘I like the yellow ones.’
‘Which country suffered a major earthquake in January 2010?’
‘God … er.’ He paused.
I turned to Jack in surprise. I didn’t read the news enough. I didn’t watch it at all. I watched reruns of Friends after work. But even I knew that. And Jack was a travel journalist. Surely he knew? How could he not?
Kate was looking at Jack too. ‘I’ll give you a clue … it begins with “h” and ends with “i” …’
Jack was staring down at his hands. I looked back at Kate. I mouthed Haiti? at her, and she nodded quickly.
‘Are you having a brain fade?’ I said kindly to Jack. I’d had them all the time in early pregnancy. I’d had a cheque returned because I had dated it 1995. I was taking a note of a meeting with my manager and had forgotten completely what it was about and had to ask. It was like losing my mind. I had sympathy for those on-the-spot moments in a way I never had before.
Jack looked across at me. I expected his expression to be grateful, maybe embarrassed. But there was anger in those eyes. It disappeared as soon as mine locked on to his, though I was sure I had seen it.
‘I was –’ he said, then stopped himself.
‘You were?’
‘I don’t know the answer,’ he said stiffly. ‘Sorry.’
‘It was Haiti,’ Kate said.
‘I was …’ he said again.
‘What?’ I said, turning to Jack.
He laid his hand on the table. No. He didn’t lay it. He banged it. Slapped it. It disturbed Dad’s gin and tonic, which jumped very slightly across the coaster with a chink.
‘I …’ I began, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘You what?’ Mez said to Jack. His eyes were narrowed. He had shadows underneath them, as if he was always wearing smudged eyeliner. He looked more like an ageing rock star than the mushroom farmer he was. He was principled, but in a highly strung way. He was always sharing political articles on Facebook. He stood up to bigots when watching Newcastle United. Almost got himself in fights a lot. That kind of thing.
So, of course, it was Mez who pushed it. And there was no one worse to do so. Dad and Kate were staring down into their laps, embarrassed. Dad ran a finger over the rim of his gin and tonic until it made a high-pitched humming sound.
‘Nothing,’ Jack said. ‘Nothing.’
‘Right. Well – no need for rudeness.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Haiti. Biggest disaster of the year,’ Mez said, spurred on by Jack’s sullen response. ‘Best look that up.’
‘You don’t know,’ Jack said to Mez, ‘why someone might not know something.’
‘Seriously, mate, there’s no need for attitude.’
‘No attitude here,’ Jack said, slapping both of his hands down on the table again.
Nobody spoke for a few seconds after that. It was excruciating.
My phone beeped, dispelling the atmosphere. It was Amrit: could I chat to him soon, he missed me? I ignored it. It wasn’t his fault, but every time I saw his name, I remembered. The expression on my consultant’s face. The frost that crunched underfoot as I thought, over and over again, what have I done? Driving away from the hospital for the last time.
Jack ignored us, necking his lemonade and helping himself to another. Dad’s eyes tracked him as he moved across the kitchen. I tried to catch Dad’s gaze. To apologize. For everything. For Mum dying. For leaving medicine. For Ben. For getting pregnant. He’d been my confidant, all that year, but I’d leant on him too much; put him through too many traumas. He didn’t meet my eyes, though, didn’t seem to want to.
We played for real after that. The atmosphere dissipated, but it didn’t go completely, like the ever-present mists in Oban.
Mez watered the mushrooms after the game. I went with him. I had always liked him. Maybe more than I liked Kate.
They were still flirtatious, Mez and Kate; still laughed at each other’s jokes, never jibed at each other in company. A few weeks before Ben and I broke up, we went for Chinese with them both. While we were trying to choose between prawn toast and crispy duck, Mez leant over and planted a kiss on the side of Kate’s shoulder. I was transfixed, staring at the damp shining mark on her skin, embarrassed to be privy to suc
h a gesture. That was one of the things that attracted me to Jack: I wanted, shamelessly, what they had.
‘God,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen them since they were planted.’ They were spectacular. They were growing in his garage, which he was in the process of extending. The light was dim and the mushrooms were in six rows, on top of each other like bunk beds. Their white tops loomed out of the soil like bright eyeballs, the darker stems almost invisible in the gloom. They were growing them in old coffee grounds. Upcycling, Mez called it. Then selling them as ‘grow your own’ gifts.
‘I know – my babies. Shame they bloody need watering all the time. It’s quite hard work,’ he murmured. ‘Kate said you had a syringe trick.’
‘Me? Yeah,’ I said.
He handed me a syringe I had given to her years ago, for getting the lemon into lemon drizzle cake. The needle had been removed, but the rest was just how I remembered. A blue end. The mls in black.
I filled it with water at the sink, then pointed it in the air, tapped it, and pressed the end to dispel the air that had floated to the top.
‘Jesus, this is like Trainspotting,’ Mez said.
‘Just getting the air out,’ I murmured. Then I took it to the mushroom bed and injected it, in four sites around the mushroom. ‘Easy,’ I said. ‘It’ll get into the soil more deeply.’
Mez was looking at me in that way people sometimes did when I did something medical; when I sewed a hole in a coat using a perfect interrupted stitching pattern, because the previous day I had used the same method on somebody’s arm. When I asked if Kate’s shoulder pain was radiating and accompanied by nausea. When I inspected people’s moles at parties, close up, looking for the irregular edges. When I had known Mum’s exact drug doses off the top of my head.
‘You’re a regular hipster,’ I said, reaching out and fingering a particularly long mushroom whose top was protruding out into the aisle. It was silken, warm. The room smelt of peat and dank.
‘I know. Planning on starting to brew craft beer next,’ Mez said, turning to me and flashing me a white smile.
‘Beehive on your rooftop garden?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. He turned a red lamp on. ‘You alright, anyway? Just come for the watering fun?’ He grabbed a metal can and started trickling water in. It sounded soft and pleasant, like a nearby stream.
‘I …’ I said, and then I stopped. I looked at Mez. He’d stopped pouring, was looking at me. I could only see the white of his eyeballs. ‘Things with Jack are …’
And that’s as far as I got. Any further would have made it real. I couldn’t go on. But I didn’t need to.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I can tell.’
‘I don’t know him,’ I said. ‘And his baby is … already here, really.’
Mez nodded. He was still looking at me with that direct gaze. ‘I’m glad you said something,’ he said. ‘Do you trust him?’
I frowned. Why did he go there so quickly?
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘I only ask because I don’t.’
‘Oh.’ I couldn’t say anything else.
Tears and fear and sadness were budding in my throat, growing and blooming like the mushrooms that surrounded us. Multiplying exponentially. Filling the gaps. Audrey thought I was fragile. Mad, even. Imagining things. But Mez agreed with my doubts. Who was right? I thought about it, there in the gloom of the garage. Audrey was more sensible. Less hot-headed. I trusted her more.
‘Because of …’ I trailed off.
Mez said nothing, but he heaved a small, sad sigh. He came and stood closer to me, his cold hand on my shoulder.
‘What?’ I said.
The private feeling of foreboding I held in my stomach, next to Wally, reared up again. Change was thundering along towards me. Everything that happened that autumn seemed to happen so fast. The relationship. The pregnancy. Like my life was a black-and-white silent film on double speed.
‘I would never have said something if you hadn’t, but I saw him,’ Mez said. ‘He was … he was yelling at someone.’
‘What? When?’
‘Last week. I was on Millennium Bridge. He was in that Starbucks nearby. He stormed off.’
‘Who was he yelling at?’
‘A man.’
‘Why didn’t you ask him?’
‘He was pretty far away,’ Mez said. ‘I saw him through two windows.’ He shaped his hands into a square. ‘As I was walking. I couldn’t see him properly. I don’t know. It was really weird, Rach. I wish you could’ve seen it.’
‘What date? I’ll ask him.’
‘I don’t bloody know the date,’ he said with a laugh, and that lightened the tone, and I was thankful for it. ‘Last week. He should know, shouldn’t he? How often does he yell at people?’
The door at the back of the garage creaked open and I saw Kate’s blonde hair shining in the hallway lamplight.
She eased the door open further. ‘You alright?’ she said. ‘You’ve been ages.’
‘Filling her in on Jack,’ Mez said, turning away and watering another trough.
‘Oh – what was all that earlier?’ Kate said, gesturing with her thumb behind her. She was wearing a hammered silver ring.
The door closed softly and we were in darkness again.
‘I don’t know,’ I said tightly.
‘I was telling her what I saw on the bridge,’ Mez said.
‘I thought of something else,’ Kate said, and she moved towards him, putting her hand on his arm.
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Something else?’
‘We’re a bit obsessed,’ Kate said with a smile. ‘There’s something. I don’t know.’
‘Obsessed?’ I said. ‘God. Don’t turn the tractor-beam Kate obsession on Jack, please. He’s not Brody from Homeland. He’s not up for deconstruction.’
‘Tractor beam?’ she said, frowning. I’d offended her.
‘You’re just … you know. When you get obsessed with stuff.’
She ignored me. ‘Look at his phone,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look what he does with it.’
‘Whatever,’ I said. My stomach was clenching at the thought of confronting him. Because of Wally. Because it was so crucial that we all just got along.
I thought of the time I’d demanded to see his phone. It had been face down on the sofa. And he’d passed it to me; I’d been relieved. But hadn’t he opened the Facebook Messenger app for me, shown me just that? I’d never had access to everything in his phone, not really.
‘Just tread carefully,’ Mez said. ‘In the meantime. You hardly know him, after all.’
I couldn’t argue with that.
We did watch the film, in the end. I sat next to Jack. He scooted closer to me, so that our legs were touching, his arm around me. He always sat like this with me.
He was jiggling his knee the entire time. The nervous energy seemed to be rolling off him, less like waves and more like a fine coastal mist that infiltrated everything. He kept sighing, too, at the sexist moments.
An hour in, his phone buzzed. It was lying, face down, on the arm of Kate’s rust-coloured sofa. He picked it up and tapped something out. The room was lit up only by the television and his phone, and it disturbed everybody. I turned my head, just a few degrees, towards him, and he immediately tilted the phone into his body. Away from me. It was only marginal, but it was obvious.
I frowned, and he put it down.
After the film was over, he was stretching while Kate flicked the big light on.
‘We’d better go,’ I said, checking my watch.
‘Need a wee,’ he said quietly to me. ‘Too many lemonades. I am off the rails.’
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. ‘Wild,’ I said.
He took two steps away from me. Then stopped, as if he’d met a threshold, a wall, an unexpected force field across his path. ‘Ah,’ he said, turning around. His tone was faux casual. I could hear the nuance in it. If I wasn’t
looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed.
His left hand was already extending as he turned, reaching out towards the arm of the sofa, like he’d left something precious there. And hadn’t he? He snatched his phone up and disappeared out of the room. He dropped it into the back pocket of his jeans as he walked. I saw the rectangular shape of it. How I wished I could pickpocket him, I found myself thinking.
When I looked up, Mez was staring at me from across the room, his eyebrows raised. I couldn’t see his eyes. Kate was still standing by the light switch, watching us both thoughtfully. They didn’t look at each other. They were both looking at me.
To be honest, it wasn’t thinking about his phone that made me decide to google him again. It was the other stuff; peripheral things. His weird cafe meeting. Him yelling at somebody. If there was anything really awful, I reasoned, Google would tell me. If that temper had ever got him into serious trouble.
I’d done it before, of course. Early on. When I was intrigued, not paranoid. Nothing. But had I read every hit? Had I been paying close enough attention?
I went straight to the bathroom as soon as we got in, determined to do it. I didn’t even take my coat off. And there, leaning against his spotless sink, I typed in his name.
Jack Ross.
The first few hits were familiar. A sponsorship page showing he’d donated to Parkinson’s UK, last year. He’d done a run for it. I smiled at the thought of him running; he hated it. What was the point? he’d say. You end where you started. But he’d done a charity run.
I looked at the photograph. It was blurred and small. But it didn’t look like Jack. I took a screenshot of it, then zoomed in on the photograph. There was something off about it. It didn’t look like his stance. I might have been googling him, discussing him with my family, digging into his history, but I knew his body better than anyone. The arms were wrong. He always stood with the tops of his hands facing ever so slightly forwards. This man had them by his side.
I shook my head. I must be wrong.
I looked at the rest. Articles upon articles. Most for small travel sites, one for the Guardian. More for City Lights. A romantic article about how he’d met me, in Newcastle, that he’d already emailed to me.
Everything but the Truth Page 9