That didn’t help. The literal closing of an entire life.
‘Right,’ I said.
‘Then it was Christmas. Right after. And we were safe – you don’t know how big a thing that was. And even though it came at a cost, we were safe. We weren’t listening out for the locks being jimmied. We weren’t pricing up the expense of turning the listed building into a double-glazed one and battling with the bloody councils over it. There was so much guff surrounding all those break-ins, and suddenly it was gone.’
I shivered in the school cloakroom. Those words. Those words. Relief. He was relieved that he had killed someone. A vigilante. He was glad, on some level. It was convenient. Could this really be true? What if he’d planned it all along? Intended to kill?
I thought of Wally inside me. Connected to me. Made of Jack and me. I thought of the way Jack made me feel. Treasured, in the way he savoured my Rachel-things. The way he flung an arm across me in his sleep and scooted me closer to him.
I had to accept it. I had to move on. For Wally. It was a horrible situation, to be burgled repeatedly. There was a struggle. It was an accident. It was an unusual situation. Mitigating circumstances. He wasn’t a sinister person. We had to move on. I consciously turned my gaze to him.
‘How was Christmas?’ I said.
‘Uneventful. Flat. It drizzled. We went for a walk. We didn’t talk. All the legal stuff was kicking off, but we didn’t want a break from it. We just wanted to know. Davey was struggling. Though he got a Rubik’s Cube, which he loved.’ Jack squeezed my hand. He paused, then said, ‘Happy?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and that seemed to relax him.
His left hand drifted down to the front of my coat. He undid the button, and his hand crept in. It was cold, but I liked it, anyway.
‘How is he?’ he said. ‘We won’t find out the sex, next week, will we? I want a surprise.’
My stomach was taut underneath his hands. The bump was almost there. Soon, it would round out, and I’d look pregnant.
‘I can read the scans.’
‘Can you?’
‘Yeah. It looks either like a turtle or a hamburger,’ I said.
‘Which one’s the boy?’
‘The turtle.’ I grinned.
‘Oh,’ he said. His face transformed, from sullen to happy, dimples creasing either side of his mouth. That smile. The straight teeth. The pointy incisors.
‘What will Wally’s surname be?’ I said quietly.
Jack paused. His smile disappeared. It was like the sun going in. ‘I …’
‘Exactly,’ I said. I looked down at my hands. The nails were bitten.
‘Wally Ross-Douglas-Anderson?’ Jack said eventually.
‘Maybe we could amalgamate them all. Dougrosson.’
‘I like that. Another new name,’ he said.
And it was his laugh that annoyed me then. Like the first little crack of an eggshell. It wasn’t funny. Not at all. Would we tell our child their father had killed someone – and changed his name to hide from it? Or would we keep it from him? I didn’t know which was worse.
‘It’s not fucking funny,’ I said.
My words sliced through the air between us, and Jack immediately shifted away from me. From us.
‘I am well aware of that,’ he said.
I wasn’t being fair, I know I wasn’t. I was making jokes about it on my own terms, then snapping at him if he did the same.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
‘Nothing. Nothing. I just sometimes feel –’ I stopped, looking at him.
A year ago I had never met him. On this day last year he was living his life in Oban and I was living mine in Newcastle and he was nothing to me. It sometimes felt as though my life had been one novel that had been swapped for another. I was a doctor with a boyfriend called Ben. And then I was a pregnant secretary with a boyfriend whose name I had to think twice about. We needed time. If only we could have bought ourselves time, I thought, looking at the wooden coat pegs lined up in front of me. A few seasons would have been all we needed. To settle in.
‘I sometimes feel like I don’t know you at all,’ I said.
‘You do know me.’ He shifted closer to me. His thigh was warm against my tights. ‘What do you want to know?’
I almost asked him then: more questions I had waiting, about the lawyer’s texts. But I didn’t. I couldn’t put pressure on it – our new, tentative normal – so soon after he’d entrusted me with his confession, as if it was an egg that I might crush in my palm.
I tilted my head back. What did you need to know in order to know somebody? There was nothing I could say.
‘Your favourite book,’ I said, eventually.
It didn’t mean anything, not really. It was a pithy question, like someone’s Desert Island Discs or their favourite colour. It wouldn’t tell me what I needed to know: was he good? Was he a good person? What went on inside his head? How would he react if I angered him? How easily did he forgive? What would he do if faced with a situation where it was harder to do the right thing? These were the important questions, but I couldn’t ask them. And if I did, he would tell me what I wanted to hear, like a poor job interview candidate whose only weakness was their perfectionism.
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Can I be unpretentious?’
‘Please do,’ I said.
I felt a positive rush then, like opening a bottle of fizzy lemonade. I loved him. That was what mattered. Not the past. I wouldn’t read that bloody trial transcript. Why would I?
‘Bridget Jones,’ he said.
‘No. You managed to finish Wolf Hall. Surely not,’ I said.
He held his hands up. ‘I know, I know. But I can’t remember such an enjoyable weekend as reading that. I laughed my tits off.’
I giggled, shifting closer to him. ‘Mine’s Harry Potter,’ I said.
‘Pair of literary fools,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you didn’t say Shakespeare or something. Another thing I like about you. You’re unpretentious.’
So then I knew his favourite book. Not the one he’d talk about at dinner parties, but his real, uncool favourite. I thought it mattered, that we had climbed a rung on the ladder of fully knowing each other.
But we hadn’t, of course. Up against everything, knowing his favourite book didn’t matter at all.
34
It was the morning of our twenty-week scan and I was in the bath. My entire body was underneath the water. The only things exposed to the chilled November air were my knees and my face. Jack’s house was still cold. He just didn’t feel it. I kind of liked the contrasts, though. The warm bed, our cold noses. The cold air, and my hot limbs underneath the steaming water.
‘Hello,’ Jack said, arriving in the bathroom to brush his teeth. ‘Wow,’ he said.
‘What?’
He was wearing a grey long-sleeved T-shirt. He was laughing. ‘I’ve just never seen anyone lie in the bath like that. With just your face out. Like a hippo.’
‘Oh, a hippo, thanks,’ I said, but I was laughing, too.
‘Are you looking forward to seeing Wally again?’ Jack said. ‘He just bloody licked the bottom of my teacup,’ he said, pointing at Howard, who was, as ever, one pace behind Jack.
‘Licking your pheromones,’ I said. ‘Your juices.’ I raised my eyebrows.
Jack laughed, that low, sardonic chuckle I loved so much.
‘You’ve embarrassed him now. Look,’ Jack said. He pointed to Howard. ‘He’s limping.’
I looked at him. He was, ever so slightly. I leant over the side of the bath and picked Howard up. I palpated his sides, his abdomen. And it was as though it was a patient’s soft body underneath my fingertips. I was brisk, efficient, as I did it, my body remembering the motions. Time seemed to slow down as my fingers worked their way down his leg.
Howard didn’t react at all, just sat purring in my arms. I held his back left foot in my hand. ‘If it’s the same as with humans,’ I said, ‘he’s fine. No tender spots on his metatarsal bone
s or phalanges.’ I pressed on his heel. ‘No break in his heel. Tibia and fibula fine. They probably have different names, though,’ I muttered, letting Howard go.
‘You know all that?’ Jack said.
‘Yeah. I would’ve been a pretty bad doctor if I didn’t know tibias and fibulas,’ I said.
Jack was still looking at me, a strange, sad expression on his face.
I dressed carefully, like I was going on a first date. I unwound the bath towel and put my bra on, looking at myself in the mirror. As if in a nod to the upcoming scan, my belly was, for the first time, big in the morning.
‘Look,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘I look like I’ve swallowed a bowl,’ I muttered.
‘You look lovely.’
‘Pregnancy is a magical time,’ I said, grabbing a handful of underwear from the drawer. ‘But lots of your pants don’t fit.’
Jack held up a finger. ‘I can’t believe I forgot this,’ he said.
He started rooting around in his backpack. He took it everywhere when he was writing. His MacBook Air. His reusable Starbucks cup. A notepad. He was a cliché; a lovely cliché. I heard a rustling and he pulled out a Topshop bag.
‘A present for the mother of my child,’ he smiled. He passed it to me.
I reached a hand inside, felt the stick of a coat hanger and a crinkly present. ‘You’ve wrapped it,’ I said.
‘Yes, with one caveat,’ he said. ‘You didn’t have any Sellotape. I was going to give it to you at yours, after we went to Oban. So I used this weird stuff.’
I looked at the present. It was small, and neatly wrapped. I ran my finger over the edges. It was wrapped with what I always used, what I always had to hand: Transpore dressing tape. ‘It’s medical tape,’ I said with a smile. ‘Transpore.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘No, no,’ I said, a memory assaulting me.
Getting Kate’s Christmas presents on Christmas Eve, during a run of night shifts, and wrapping them in medical blue tissue roll and Transpore dressing tape. ‘Oh, thanks,’ she’d said sarcastically, but everybody had smiled. They knew to expect it, with me. In return, she’d bought me five tennis balls, the next year.
I unwrapped two pairs of pants. I unfolded them. One said Beefcake on it. The other said PUGLYF with a pug on the bum.
‘Wow,’ I laughed.
‘They didn’t have maternity so I got you big ones,’ he said.
‘Beefcake.’
‘I just want you to be comfortable.’ He reached for the Beefcake pants and turned them over. On the bum – the massive butt – was a cartoon hamburger.
‘I think I need to wear them to the scan,’ I said, giggling as I pulled them up my legs.
Jack took the tag off, gently, behind me, his hands cool against my hips.
‘They’ll think we’re hooligans. They’ll call social services,’ he said.
I turned around and caught sight of myself in the mirror. A rounded stomach. An old bra. And enormous Beefcake pants.
‘You look like a person who’s got their life in order,’ Jack said, covering a cheeky smile with his hand.
‘No joke, these are seriously comfortable,’ I said.
I pulled some jeans on. He slipped a top over my head, and we left.
There was a letter for me on the passenger seat. I’d left it in my car. I was supposed to open it on the way to work, but I’d forgotten. Jack passed it to me, wordlessly.
I didn’t know it then, but the distinctive teal-coloured logo was hiding inside. I opened it in the car, before starting the ignition. It was from the GMC. It had been nearly a year. My qualification as a doctor was to lapse if I did nothing by the spring.
My whole body went cold. My teeth started chattering. I’d thought that wouldn’t happen. I’d been paying my licence fees. I thought I had longer before the whole thing lapsed. There it was. In blue and white. It would all be over soon. Everything I’d worked for. All those bloody OSCE exams. All those skills I had. The ability to take a history. To palpate an abdomen and find the point of pain easily. To cannulate even the most destroyed vein; I was the person everybody asked to cannulate. It was my thing. They’d all lapse, those skills. They’d fall away, like animals dying by the side of the road.
‘Lapse?’ Jack said, reading over my shoulder.
‘Yeah, if you don’t do professional development. And pay a licence fee.’
‘You’d lose it all?’
‘Yeah.’ I couldn’t look at him.
My feelings were written all over my face, as though I’d been asked to throw out my most sentimental possession, or ship Howard off to a new owner.
‘Jeez, Rach. Are you sure?’
‘Very,’ I said, folding up the envelope, reaching across him and putting it in the glove box. Away. I couldn’t talk about it. Not then.
‘Would you have to go back to med school? Do it all again?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Oh, good.’
‘Because I don’t want to be a doctor.’
‘But you would have to – if you did?’
‘I don’t even know, to be honest. I don’t know what the procedure is.’ I turned the key in the ignition.
I wanted to change the subject, to distract Jack. To distract my own thoughts so I wouldn’t have to face the prospect of thirty more years typing attendance notes for lawyers.
‘Look,’ I said, pointing to the utility-room window.
The back door was painted green. It had a watering can next to it. And in the window of the room was Howard, his large eyes looking forlorn.
‘Jesus, he’s fat,’ Jack said with a laugh. Howard’s neck did look enormous.
‘It’s a bad angle for him,’ I said.
‘I feel weird about that letter,’ Jack said, buttoning up his coat. It was a parka, dark green.
That was the first day I’d seen him in a winter coat, having met him in the spring. He looked nice. Cool. A bit posh. Like a hipster. Irresistible.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Trust me – nobody wants to be a doctor in the NHS at the moment.’
He paused, was silent for a long time. I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, but then he did.
‘Fair enough,’ he said.
But I kept looking at the glove box. I kept seeing the letter inside it. And, when we got to the hospital, I opened it, just a fraction, while Jack was at the parking payment machine. I pulled the letter out through the slot, and put it in my pocket. Maybe I could do some professional development. Some locum work. Maybe.
I knew the way to the sonographer’s room. Thankfully, it was in a different block. I didn’t have to see any of my work colleagues, or my old Block B1, or the third room from the left where it happened.
‘Jesus, five quid for two hours,’ Jack said, feeding coin after coin into the metre.
‘Blame the government,’ I said.
‘I do,’ he said, raising an eyebrow and looking at me.
The atmosphere between us was strange since that letter. I felt more than a little guilty. The guilt had started to trade places with the anger. He didn’t know my story. Hardly anybody did. But it was different, I kept telling myself. It was nuanced. Definitely not the same as what he’d done.
The sonographer was called Sandra. I think I had seen her in the hospital canteen. She had dark hair and lots of freckles.
The room was dimly lit. It had the same blinds as the rooms I saw the boy in. There was a distinctive smell about my hospital, the Royal Victoria Infirmary. I stopped being able to smell it, when I was there so much it felt like home. But I could smell it again, going for that scan. The lemon, bleach and antiseptic of all hospitals; and other smells, too. The Costa from the main thoroughfare. The smell of the carpet in the side rooms that I slept in after they had been hoovered. The hot, musty smell the old computers pumped out into the offices.
The sonographer was faffing with the computer. It had frozen. She was moving the mouse back and forth, giving me a ru
eful smile. It unfroze.
‘Ah. Rachel Anderson,’ she said. ‘I thought I recognized you.’ She turned and smiled at me.
Jack raised his eyebrows.
‘That would explain why I haven’t seen you,’ she said.
I merely nodded, instead of correcting her. Lots of doctors went on maternity leave early. It was too physical a job to do pregnant, for some. The aches and pains after a fifteen-hour night shift were enough on their own. And then there was the sickness. You had to have a strong stomach for medicine.
And so I let her believe what she probably believed: that I was married, that I was ready, that I hadn’t quit my job mere months before getting pregnant, thus ensuring I was eligible for precisely no maternity pay. Not that it mattered – except it did. It mattered a lot to me.
I looked at Jack. He was looking at the screen. This would never happen to him, I found myself thinking. People would never say, oh, Jack Ross. Because he had changed his name. Changed his identity. Did he now naturally answer to Jack and not John? I wondered.
‘Sorry about this,’ Sandra said as the computer froze again. ‘We just have to wait. It’s so slow at the moment.’
‘I remember it well,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s changed then?’
‘God, no. You were a paediatric reg, weren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
And, despite myself, I felt a flush of pride. Despite how it ended, despite the fact that it was over, I had still been there. I had still been Rachel Anderson, MB ChB, BMedSc, MRCPCH.
Sandra wiggled the mouse again, but nothing happened. She reached forward and stretched her fingers, opening the flimsy metal blinds.
‘It’s set to snow,’ she said, indicating the spindly November trees, the branches bare like they had been caught just out of the shower. Already, then, my mind was cartwheeling over what she’d said, scanning for something, though I didn’t know it.
I looked at the sky. It was white and heavy, had that reddish-orange quality. It had been mild, though, this morning.
‘Doubt it,’ Jack said. ‘It’s not cold enough, is it?’
‘Just what I was thinking,’ I said to him.
‘Remember the last time it properly snowed?’ Sandra said. ‘People are only just ready for more again, aren’t they? A few years back now. 2009? Yes – it was 2009, because Julia was just born …’
Everything but the Truth Page 20