Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  20

  Jack’s parents were unloading wine in the kitchen. Dad and Kate were sitting awkwardly at the table. Sebastien was resting his head in Dad’s lap.

  ‘I feel like Mr Darcy,’ said Jack.

  ‘Mr Darcy?’ Kate said.

  ‘You know, we’re introducing our families,’ he said. He was smiling, leaning casually against the wall. He seemed to unfurl in Oban; become more himself. ‘Like in the nineteenth century.’

  His parents had shown us around. We all walked down the stone steps that fronted their house. I saw the moment Dad really realized the Rosses were rich. His eyes trailed upwards, like watching a balloon drift from a child’s hand towards the heavens. Up at the drive, the steps, the frontage of the house, and then to everything else beyond it. The woodland behind the house – theirs. The casual riches – brand-new cars on the drive. A stone statue of a woman in the fourth window from the left on the second floor, looking out at us. A ride-on lawn mower, abandoned on the grass in front of the house.

  ‘Well, usually we’d meet at the wedding,’ Jack’s mum said now. She laughed, but there was an edge to it. A horrible edge. Not only disapproval, but a faint look down at my stomach.

  Jack’s dad followed her gaze, and the atmosphere worsened. I suppose it was the fact that these people, these uptight parents of his, now knew about our less-than-careful sex life, because I was an emblem of it.

  ‘Ideally,’ Jack’s father said.

  ‘I think we’re doing pretty well, actually,’ Jack said, smiling at me. ‘Me and my girlfriend,’ he murmured, catching my eye.

  His parents had finished unpacking the shopping and stood proud, like lions, looking Dad in the eye. Dad was still looking up at them, skittish, like an antelope about to run.

  It wasn’t until much later that Jack and I were finally alone. It was close to midnight. It was completely dark outside. If we’d been in the garden, we wouldn’t have been able to see our hands in front of us. But we were in the living room. The fire was glowing softly, the embers red but no longer flaming.

  I’d tried to reload the articles, every time I was alone for a moment; every time I was in the toilet or left the family gathering on the pretext of making cups of tea. And every time, none of the articles were there. I could ask him, I thought. But it would change everything forever. For me, and for Wally, if I accused his father of something. We’d split up. Surely. And I was probably wrong. Catastrophically wrong. It had happened before.

  Kate walked into the living room. Jack flinched. He was by the window. I was in the armchair.

  ‘You alright?’ I said to her, no longer so absorbed by what I’d found that I couldn’t speak.

  ‘Do you know, I was going to bail. Couldn’t be bothered to come. Sorry. It is interesting to meet them, but it’s a long way. But then I had a row with Mez. So I’ve escaped.’

  I turned to her in surprise, jolted out of my self-involved problems. ‘What?’ I said. I’d never known Mez and Kate fight. Not once. There had never been an atmosphere, no sniping remarks, nothing. No more, I thought. No more drama in our family. At least not for a while.

  ‘He’s so bloody high and mighty, sometimes,’ she said.

  I had to concede that, much as I liked him. He wasn’t the type of man I would choose. He was serious, intense – not self-effacing or funny, like Jack. He had no perspective.

  ‘He hasn’t texted,’ she said, waving her phone in the darkness.

  ‘Text him,’ I said, sinking back into my own mind. I stared at the mullioned windows. I could see the embers reflected in them. Kate disappeared, her socked feet making padding noises on the stone floor, and Jack and I were alone again.

  ‘How are my Wallies?’ he said softly.

  I couldn’t help but smile, and as I did so, my eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I feel weird,’ I said instead, wiping a tear away.

  He immediately walked away from the window and came and sat in the chair with me. There wasn’t enough room for both of us, and his hips squeezed against mine uncomfortably.

  ‘Are you being a mad pregnant lady?’ he said softly.

  ‘I sometimes feel like I don’t know who you are,’ I said, and then the tears overcame me completely, juddering sobs like a boat that couldn’t quite get started.

  ‘What? What?’ Jack was saying softly, those Scottish ‘h’s, his arms around me. They weren’t on my stomach, on my bump; they were around my shoulders, just for me, and I appreciated that. It wasn’t about Wally. It was about us.

  ‘I just … it’s all so fast.’

  ‘It is fast,’ he murmured in my ear. ‘Really fast.’

  ‘We were a bit stupid,’ I said, turning to him.

  His eyes weren’t on me. They were on the windows. He was squinting at something out there.

  ‘I just feel like – who are you?’ I said.

  ‘Me?’ he said. His eyes swivelled to me. They were so dark and direct. As dark as the coals in the fire. As dark as the Oban night outside.

  ‘The Douglas stuff. I didn’t even know that was a name you used. Is your first name even Jack?’

  He paused, looking at me. ‘It’s John,’ he said, eventually. ‘I use John Douglas.’

  It was bitter-sweet. He was telling me the truth. But he was John Douglas.

  ‘You see, I didn’t even know that,’ I lied.

  He wiped a tear away from my cheek. His thumbs were rough. His eyes were locked on to mine. He was blinking slowly. His thighs were flush against mine. His hand was resting, lightly cupping my jaw. My hands were on his firm, warm chest. We were one being, in that chair in the dark. It was so authentic, sitting there with him. His body was warm and his breath was softly tickling my face.

  ‘I promise, there’s nothing you need to know,’ he said. His eyes were still locked on to mine. His dark eyelashes were long, but not curly. They were straight.

  I almost told him then. About the boy. Maybe he should know, I thought, with a twinge of guilt. Maybe he should know, because he was having a child with me. Maybe he ought to know that I can’t be trusted. In loco parentis.

  But I didn’t.

  He kissed me, lightly at first, and then more deeply. A bonfire collapsed in my stomach.

  I pulled away from him and he looked back at me.

  He was hiding nothing.

  I had an email in the morning.

  ITEM 7

  Private and Confidential

  By email only: rachelanderson1@gmail.com

  Your ref: AK/46248/JR197

  Dear Ms Anderson

  Confidential: Request under The Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme

  Further to your request dated 29 October under the above-named scheme, we have reviewed the relevant documentation and can confirm the following:

  Jack Ross: Aberdeen, UK: no convictions

  Jack Ross: Birmingham, UK: no convictions

  Jack Ross: Cornwall, UK: no convictions

  Jack Ross: Cardiff, UK: no convictions

  Jack Ross: Edinburgh, UK: no convictions

  Jack Ross: Enfield, UK: no convictions

  Jack Ross: London, UK: no convictions

  Jack Ross: Orkney, UK: no convictions

  Jack Ross: Preston, UK: no convictions

  Jack Ross: Somerset, UK: no convictions

  Jack Ross: Suffolk, UK: no convictions

  If you have any queries you should contact us on the telephone number below and quote the above reference. Alternatively you can refer to our website below. In the absence of any further communication from you your enquiry will be closed in 28 days.

  Kind regards

  Nicola Smith

  Information Governance Officer

  I deleted the email once I’d read it. It was the wrong name, anyway.

  21

  We were walking along the high part of the coast and into Oban on the Sunday, for a roast. I was trying to pretend my legs weren’t cramping up from very mild exercise.

  Kate and I broke o
ff from everybody.

  ‘Pregnancy’s rubbish,’ I puffed.

  ‘Your hair looks amazing, though,’ she said.

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Yeah. So thick and shiny.’

  I smiled at that. ‘The way to any girl’s heart is a hair compliment,’ I said, and she grinned too.

  We walked past McCaig’s Tower, a coliseum-type structure overlooking the harbour that had large ovals for windows. We were so far ahead of everybody that we sat down in one. The windows were large enough to seat both of us, side by side, our legs swinging down to the stone below us.

  ‘Got to hand it to you, Oban’s pretty,’ Kate said.

  It wasn’t raining, but there was a very fine mist in the air. It might have been sea spray. It was hard to tell, sometimes, if it was weather or atmosphere on the west coast. The sky was a blank, flat white, and the sea reflected that; a pale grey as far as we could see.

  ‘Mum would have liked it,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Kate said softly. ‘She liked castles and stuff, didn’t she?’ She patted the stone.

  ‘She did. Dad hated being dragged around them.’

  Kate said nothing for a few moments. Grief was strange. It seemed so large from afar. But, up close, it was just one day after another.

  ‘You seem really weird this weekend,’ Kate said.

  ‘I feel better now,’ I said. And I did. My talk with Jack had helped.

  Somehow, articulating the anxiety to him had almost eradicated it, as though I might have been a person with a guilty secret that needed to escape, or a blood disease of the Victorian times which needed letting. I hardly cared about those articles, those half-articles, that afternoon sitting on the stone monument with Kate.

  Jack had been straight with me. He wouldn’t lie.

  ‘I wonder if I could hit a ball through these gaps,’ Kate said in a musing tone. It was nice, her way. So non-confrontational.

  ‘If anyone could, it’d be you,’ I said. I looked at her. She was wearing mittens with owl faces on. ‘I bet you haven’t worn mittens for years.’

  ‘Nope …’ she said with a nod.

  It was warm where the tennis tournaments were. She’d lived in shorts year-round, inexplicably turning up at Newcastle airport in neon in the winter.

  ‘… no way I could. My aim was pretty poor.’

  ‘For a tennis player,’ I said. ‘Which is better than most.’

  Kate shrugged. It was her story – that she’d failed. Anybody else would regard her as a success. We both regarded ourselves as failures; people who’d tried but couldn’t hack it. Dad was always saying we were successful, just at things that weren’t in our original plan, but we didn’t agree.

  ‘What’s Mez done, then?’ I said.

  ‘He was being self-righteous.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He was being a dick.’

  ‘Don’t say that. You’re married,’ I said, like that really made a moral difference.

  Kate swivelled her gaze towards me. ‘So?’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Mez is quite often a complete prick,’ she said. ‘You don’t know. You don’t know what he’s like sometimes. Belligerent. He totally doesn’t get the tennis thing. I’m home and everything is totally different and – it turns out, despite what everybody thought – I’m not going to be a tennis star. And he doesn’t get it. Thinks I should just move on and be positive.’

  ‘Don’t say that. You and Mez are like …’ I was denying it. I thought their marriage was perfect, didn’t want to hear if it wasn’t.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My Patronus,’ I said with a grin.

  Kate and I loved Harry Potter. She once declared, ‘It’s a very important part of my life, okay?’ to a fellow tennis player, who told her she was immature.

  But then I thought back to the times I’d seen Mez baiting people with different political opinions to him on Facebook. I loved him for those principles. He knew himself. He’d always do the right thing. He had conviction. I liked that. But he wouldn’t leave it; would harangue people. I nearly always agreed with him, but maybe that wasn’t the point. I bet it wasn’t even Jack he saw in the street. It seemed ridiculous now I thought about it. Why would Jack be yelling at anybody? Had I ever heard him even raise his voice?

  ‘We are not,’ she said.

  And, after that, after knowing that they were unhappy sometimes, less than perfect – well. Everything was a little bit worse.

  ‘We fell out over schooling a hypothetical child,’ Kate said.

  She picked at some moss on the wall, then ran her finger over and over a rough divot in the stone. I wondered what had formed it.

  ‘Who wants what?’ I said.

  Kate waved a hand. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘The only thing that matters is that he – he came at me.’

  ‘Came at you?’

  ‘Just shouting.’ She looked at me quickly. ‘Nothing more. I know you love Mez. But he was just like a stupid boy spoiling for a fight. Following me. Yelling at me about his own bloody opinions.’

  The word was imbued with distaste. I guessed it was a common word used in their household, to explain and defend his behaviour. Mez was almost defined by his opinions. Maybe that’s why I liked him so much; I could relate. I used to spend every working day having to have an opinion on something: what to do next? Was the patient in Bed C septic? Should we try targeted or whole-brain radiotherapy?

  But it seemed that even my favourite, Mez himself, was flawed. He came at me.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘That’s horrible.’

  I drew my knees up to my chest, sat curled up like a snail on the cold stone wall next to Kate. My bum was getting wet, but I didn’t care. Jack would never do that to me, I was thinking. He would never follow me around like that, be aggressive.

  ‘What’re you going to do?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t know. I love him,’ she said. ‘I really, really like him, too. He’s my favourite person.’

  We sat in silence for a while. What could any of us do? We all compromised for love.

  ‘I hate those bloody mushrooms,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘Oh,’ I said with a laugh.

  She looked at me and smiled, her eyes crinkling. ‘I don’t even like mushrooms.’

  ‘It’s definitely too late to admit that,’ I said. ‘Definitely. Anyway, I get it. I do get that. Loving someone. Them being your favourite.’

  With Ben I had thought love meant getting on really well. I liked the way he looked. I liked his manner. I enjoyed the things he said. So we progressed to living together, building a life, as if it was merely a dance whose steps we needed to follow.

  But then, later, Jack came into my life and everything changed. I was love sick, those first few weeks. It was exhilarating, but intense, like watching a birth or a curative operation. Nothing was better, in those early days, than rereading Jack’s messages to me, or turning out my light at bedtime and not sleeping, instead imagining and re-imagining all the times we’d kissed. They were so sweet, those fantasies; that time of my life. Despite everything that had preceded it. I would remember it forever.

  ‘I do know,’ I said. ‘Look at me, up-duffed.’

  Kate sighed. ‘I put up with his shit. Because I love him. It’s as simple as that. Sadly.’

  I remembered when she met Mez.

  ‘I’ve met a boy,’ she’d said, the day after a wedding.

  She’d looked tanned, happy, a bit smug. He’d come over the next day, and he’d gone to every single tournament with her after that.

  ‘I know,’ I said now. I did know it well.

  And we’d do anything for that feeling. Both of us. All of us.

  I tilted my head and looked at the sky. If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said their relationship was what I aspired to; that it was complete perfection. It was funny how things changed as you looked at them from different angles, like an optical illusion. Everybody’s take on their own story
was different.

  ‘How do you feel about becoming a mum?’ she said quietly.

  I considered the question as the Oban wind whipped my hair around my face. It smelt of Jack’s shampoo which I’d used to wash it. Cheap stuff. Apple-scented. I liked it.

  ‘I do feel worried.’

  ‘We didn’t have the best role model,’ she said.

  I nodded. ‘Yeah. Not the most maternal. I feel bad saying it now,’ I confided, bringing my hand to my face and pushing my tangled hair back.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t perfect.’

  ‘I think I’ll either be too remote, like her. Or I’ll be smothering. I feel like – like I need to work through it. Somehow. I don’t know. I feel a bit mad.’

  ‘Mad?’

  ‘Yeah. Like I’ve been suspicious of things. I was suspicious of Ben.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, though I could barely hear her as the wind carried her voice away. ‘Must be from Mum.’

  ‘Probably. It’s all tangled up. I think I’m imagining things.’

  ‘About Jack?’

  ‘Yes …’

  I filled her in briefly on his name, told her that there were some dodgy articles and I didn’t know if they were connected with him. But they had disappeared off the Internet, anyway.

  ‘Oh, but you should try the Wayback Machine,’ she said. It was offhand. She was like this. Obsessed with something one minute, but had forgotten about it the next time you spoke to her. She and Mez were fighting, so her attention was on that, instead of on me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Wayback Machine. God, I used that so much. Oh – or the dark web.’

  ‘The dark web?’

  ‘Yeah. Tennis players used that. For drugs tips, I think. You need this browser, called Tor. Then you can search things that aren’t on search engines. The deep illegal web. Apparently only five per cent of the Internet we see on Google is the real web. The rest is the dark web. The underworld.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘I didn’t use it. Anyway, try the Wayback Machine. That’s legal,’ she said with a laugh.

  ‘What did you use it for?’ I said.