Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  I couldn’t live with that, either, I thought. Maybe I was stupid. Stuck up. My standards too high.

  ‘We’re married,’ he said shortly.

  It was weird to slowly learn that my brother-in-law was flawed. He had a quick temper, didn’t listen, didn’t see that shouting at a woman was wrong. And Kate was flawed, too. She baited him. Caused arguments. I saw her do it. They weren’t the perfect partnership. There were cracks. Who knew if they would last, either? Could any of us communicate successfully? I didn’t think so. I shivered in the garage, smelling the peat of the mushrooms. Everybody was so messed up.

  ‘Give her a break,’ I said. ‘She’s just left her whole career behind.’

  ‘She did so well. She should be pleased she did so well.’

  I just looked at him.

  After a second, we heard the squeak of the door handle. It was Kate. She was early. She was in sports gear, a sweaty headband wrapped around her forehead. It was how she was; how she would always be, to me. She looked strange in day clothes with her hair down. Like an off-duty ballet dancer.

  ‘You win?’ I said to her.

  She was looking more toned again. Coaching seemed to suit her.

  ‘Yep,’ she said. ‘My girls did.’ She brushed past Mez, not saying anything, and stood next to me. She reached out and fingered a mushroom. ‘We’re harvesting soon,’ she said to me. ‘You should help. It’s super freaky. Their roots look like jellyfish.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said.

  She smiled at me. ‘What’re you up to?’ she asked.

  ‘Moaning,’ I said. ‘I miss Jack.’

  ‘I know.’ Her neon-pink headband was glowing in the darkness. She didn’t say anything for a few moments. ‘It’s failure, isn’t it? In all its forms, it’s the same.’

  ‘No. Not for me,’ I said. ‘It’s heartbreak.’

  ‘That, too,’ Kate said softly. ‘It’s the worst.’ She swallowed hard, darting a glance at Mez.

  And I saw, then, that even though they were angry at each other, there was a foundation beneath them. Mez knew, better than anyone, how Kate felt about failing at tennis, even if he viewed it positively and she negatively. Jack and I didn’t have that. We had never had that. He knew nothing of the boy, of my biggest failing. We didn’t know each other.

  And how must it have been for her, to admit defeat and come home? She simply wasn’t good enough. She had to do something else. To pass the baton, and coach others in how to play instead of playing herself. That had to be hard, slicing through her self-worth like a guillotine.

  ‘But my coach had a lot to say about it – failure,’ Kate said.

  Have the baby. Go back to medicine. I don’t know. Keep going.’

  I looked at Mez watering the plants and thought back to when Jack left. ‘Wally will be from a broken home,’ I said.

  It was so silent in the garage I could hear the water slowly trickling through each layer of soil, getting quieter and quieter until it faded away.

  ‘What’s a broken home?’ Mez said. ‘One where his parents argue all the time but are together? Or one where Mummy and Daddy never really lived together but are both happy, maybe with other people? What’s broken about that?’

  Maybe he was right. Maybe Wally would be okay.

  But I didn’t think I would. Not ever. Not ever again.

  When I arrived home I went straight to bed, even though it was still early. It was like a pain; a weight on my chest, missing him. I checked my phone. There was nothing. I missed my mum, right then. Just for a second.

  I texted Dad. Everything’s shit, I wrote, while crying.

  Think of me, he wrote back immediately, balancing my chequebook even though it’s the twenty-first century.

  I smiled faintly at that, and fell asleep, Wally turning somersaults inside me. My only comfort: I wasn’t alone.

  38

  One year ago

  I slept on it, and that made it worse. If it had happened spontaneously, if I hadn’t been able to help myself, maybe it would have mattered less.

  ‘Rachel,’ he said as I walked into his room the next morning. He looked brighter, but I knew it was to be short-lived, like an artificial flower blooming unknowingly in a greenhouse. Snow was drifting down outside, the flakes fat and Christmassy. The first snowfall of the year. It only lasted a few minutes, that day, and then it stopped.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Have you thought about it?’

  I met his eyes. His hair had never really grown back, and his head was bald with a slight fuzz around the temples. His eyes still looked like his own – cat-like and elongated – but he was otherwise unrecognizable as the boy who’d come in for his first appointment.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ I said.

  ‘I have to know.’

  ‘You can never un-know it. Once it’s there in front of you, you’ll know it forever. It will change everything you do.’

  ‘Rach, I’m begging you. Life’s not worth living right now. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care if it’s different to what the consultant said. You know more about my cancer than anyone. I want to know what you think. Please tell me. Please just tell me. I feel like I’m going insane.’

  I hesitated, waiting.

  ‘Rach?’ he said.

  He was already sickening. He just didn’t know it yet. I could see the evidence. He was an iPhone addict, and he wasn’t checking it as much. He downed Coke, incessantly, despite the health warnings the well-meaning nurses issued to him, but there was a half-full bottle languishing on his bedside table. He’d missed Match of the Day last Saturday night because he was sleeping.

  A chilly breeze came in through the open window. It was almost the shortest day of the year. Outside, it was like a winter postcard, frost on the ground. It was a strange night. He was in a room with two beds, one of them empty. It was dark save for his reading light.

  I could barely look at him; another reason why I was not a very good doctor. Death had stolen in, was practically sitting in his lap. At the very least, it was in the visiting chair next to him.

  ‘Come on, Rach. You know I’ve got capacity, or whatever bullshit term you use.’

  I shrugged, raising my shoulders helplessly. ‘It’s not actually up to me,’ I said.

  ‘So in all of this,’ the boy said, waving a slender arm around. His elbow was sticking out like one of Kate’s tennis balls, his hands pink. He’d lost weight. ‘There’s the bureaucracy of the hospital paperwork and who has to decide for me – the law, the courts, the doctors, the nurses, my mum – and then …’ He leant out of the bed, lowering his red hand as near to the floor as he could. The effort cost him, I could see. ‘There’s me. Right down here. On prognoses concerning me.’

  I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Is that right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I couldn’t fault his logic, nor his eloquence.

  The truth was, I thought he deserved to know. That humans deserved to know, if they wanted to, that their time was limited. It wasn’t the right thing to do to lie to him. He deserved to know when things were his last things; his last time seeing his best friend, his last time seeing a band live. His last game of Scrabble. He should know.

  But I also thought he could handle it. My instincts told me he could. That his mother was being overprotective. And I trusted those instincts.

  He pinched his lips together. They blanched white, with anaemia or fury, I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Please, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I have to know.’

  ‘Months,’ I said. ‘Months.’

  He looked at me. He seemed calm. ‘How many?’

  ‘It’s in your lungs and your bone marrow. I’d say it’s in your blood. You should … you should be getting your affairs in order.’

  ‘And will it … what will kill me?’ he said, looking at me, his eyes wide.

  ‘We don’t need to go there,’ I said.

  ‘But I want to know. I need to know what I�
��m up against. How many months will be good?’

  ‘A few. Two. Three. Then you’ll have fluid on your lungs.’

  ‘That’ll be what kills me?’

  ‘And the tumours. On your lungs. I would guess.’

  ‘So I’ll … I’ll drown?’ he was staring hard at me. ‘Rachel – I need to know. I want to know the warning signs. So I can say my goodbyes.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Months. Until I drown. Months.’ His jaw slackened. He looked aghast, struggling to sit up.

  I couldn’t stop looking at him. He was completely shocked. I’d done that. A feeling of dread washed over me like a cold shower. I couldn’t take it back.

  He stared at his hands then, and I closed my eyes tightly, wishing, for the first time in my career, that I really could step back in time. Just a few minutes. Just a few seconds. And undo it.

  I could barely speak. It was uncharted territory. I’d gone against the GMC’s guidelines. I’d done something a consultant wouldn’t do. All because it felt like the right thing. Looking at the boy in front of me – just a child, and not a man – I couldn’t understand myself. Couldn’t understand how I could have told him. How would I explain it to anybody else?

  My crash beep went off. I looked down at it. An arrest down the hall. ‘You alright?’ I said to the boy.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, bringing his hands together, as if in prayer. His cannulas trailed behind them. ‘Thank you for risking your job. For telling me. I can get on with planning now. Thank you, Rach.’

  39

  Present day

  Somehow, broken up from Jack, my obsession with finding answers intensified.

  I would be in the bath, or lying in bed, or eating cereal in the morning, and I would remember a place I hadn’t looked.

  Had I looked properly for John Douglas’s cached Facebook account on the Wayback Machine? I would suddenly think as I was filling the kettle.

  Or, what about googling his Twitter username and seeing if he used other sites with it?

  It was funny, really. Things with Jack had been difficult more than they had been fun for almost the entire relationship. He’d killed someone. He’d lied about it. But the other things were the things that I thought about most. The way he entwined his legs with mine in bed, his cold feet on my calves. His beautiful prose. The time I mistook his hot chocolate for a Bovril and Jack said he was flattered I viewed him as a Bovril-drinking alpha male. The way he always let himself into my flat, didn’t knock. Because he knew he was special. Because he knew that he had unlimited access to my life. That I would never shut him out. That I would never need to shut him out.

  And I think that was why I didn’t stop googling. Not because the mystery wasn’t solved, but because of how much I loved him. We were broken up, but I still loved him. And I wanted to be near him. So I carried on.

  I should have been doing something else. Talking to friends. Crying. Even going through his old text messages in a heartbroken way instead of a stalking way. And I did feel like that. I felt like half a person, going about my pointless life without him; food didn’t taste of anything at all.

  It was called ghosting, apparently. When you break up without closure. Or, rather, when you break up without saying goodbye, but it still felt applicable to me. I’d been ghosted. He hadn’t explained anything to me, not properly. I felt half there, transparent, as though automatic doors wouldn’t open for me and I might fall through my very sofa as I lay down. I’m sure others saw me as a woman who left on her own terms because she’d been lied to, but that wasn’t true. It was nothing like when Ben and I broke up. I’d walked home slowly from work one night a week after Ben had left. I’d dawdled, taking photographs of the winter skyline, and I’d felt a curiously new sensation of freedom. It was tentative, and a bit frightened, but emerging all the same. Without Jack, I felt nothing. I couldn’t even remember what I enjoyed doing. I felt like half a person. Less than.

  My closure was the Internet. I was looking at Jack’s Facebook timeline. We were still friends – he would never do something as hostile as delete me – and I’d scrolled down to the first ever posts. I’d done this before, but this time I’d clicked all posts not highlights, and there were loads more.

  A wall post from a Duncan James caught my eye. Hi, it said. I know you from SOS forum. How’s things? Jack hadn’t responded.

  I googled SOS forum. There were no relevant results, but another forum said: SOS Forum was forced to go underground after a prosecution based on its posts in 2008. Those in the know will know how to find it ;-).

  And that’s when I started thinking, remembering what Kate had said. About the dark web. What was the browser called?

  Tor. That was it. I was grateful for my good memory, the memory that had got me through med school and saved lives.

  I could just have a look. Nobody would ever know.

  I went to Tor’s website. Anonymity online was its strapline.

  I downloaded Tor – it referred to itself as second-generation onion routing; the internet was so baffling – searched for the forum, and the rest was easy.

  I received a prompt to join the forum. Without thinking, I pressed ‘register’, then realized that I couldn’t join with my current email address. I went to Gmail and set one up – findingout1986 – and then registered using a password whose numbers matched my bank card.

  I signed in and was directed straight back. I searched for air rifle, found a post by a user called Sprat9, and started reading.

  ITEM 13

  Sprat9: Me too, R0ller. I still think about him every single day – every day without fail. At the time of year that it happened I think of the days leading up to it and after it. The anniversary is the worst. Same as his birthday. To think, I never knew him, never celebrated it. In the other seasons I think of how things might have been for him now. And in the times in between it hits me randomly; when seemingly happy in a restaurant, about to place an order, I will think of when his eyes widened right before it happened. Disbelief. It was disbelief. Just before turning out the light sometimes I think of how his parents were informed – that late-night phone call, identifying his body, the ragged wound the air rifle left – and I have to keep the light on a little while longer. So I don’t have any answers, I’m afraid, but there’s somebody here all the way across the ocean who entirely understands.

  Next to his username, it said: posts: 120. A hundred and twenty posts on a forum?

  Jack had never mentioned anything like that, was derisive at times of people on forums. ‘The way they get all cliquey and flounce off, eventually,’ he had once said to me as our starters arrived in a restaurant. ‘It’s so weird. Like a crazy subculture.’

  I’d never really wondered how he knew.

  Now I kept reading.

  Sprat9: I’ve been tormenting myself with my victim’s old posts online this week. I think I’ve found him. He was a poet.

  JonnyJ19: How do you know it’s him?

  Sprat9: I just know.

  JonnyJ19: Can you show us a post of his?

  Sprat9: There was one, talking about his plans for the Christmas break. He wanted to write a song. A rap.

  JonnyJ19: You can’t live your life looking at stuff like this, mate. You’ve got to move on. There’s a cause and effect between your actions and his life, but it doesn’t mean you’re responsible for his life. It doesn’t.

  Sprat9: Doesn’t it?

  JonnyJ19: I remember the circumstances of your situation and I think I know who you are. I know how hard that must be for you. My friend was in the car with me when I crashed and that’s how he died. Yours is far more complex. Maybe you should see someone?

  It wasn’t really the things he was saying. It was the way he said them; his tone. It was imbued with a sadness, a regret he’d never expressed with me. Right there, in the safe confines of the dark web, he was being real.

  40

  My neighbour emerged from her flat just I arrived home
from Kate’s on a chilly Saturday. We’d spent some of the afternoon discussing Mum. The things we liked about her. The things that hadn’t changed in death, after discovering her infidelity. The way she collected fridge magnets, obsessively, from holiday destinations. The fridge was covered, encrusted with them like limpets. We liked the way she’d always been honest with us about motherhood. I wondered what she’d say to me now, what advice she’d give. The way she called at 6 p.m. precisely, every Monday. On the dot. As though she was demonstrating her reliability, her love, in her behaviour, if not her words.

  ‘Rachel, I signed for something for you,’ my neighbour said.

  She was a nervous character, overly concerned with the goings-on of the building, and it was almost impossible to end a conversation with her within a reasonable amount of time. She liked to summarize and recap and discuss the reasons why the maintenance of the building had changed from once a year to twice.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  I reached out and took the parcel from her. It had a silver Royal Mail Special Delivery sticker slicked across its front. I turned it over, looking curiously at it, and that’s when I saw it, and realized what it was. A blue court stamp. Glasgow something.

  It was the trial transcript. I dropped it into my handbag. It was thick and weighty.

  I went into my flat, wordlessly. I heard my neighbour calling out after me, but I ignored her.

  I tried not to read it. I knew it was a terrible thing to do, to invade Jack’s privacy like that. And I didn’t need to know now. He’d gone. It was over. But the thing I’d learnt most about myself over that long, cold, depressing autumn was that I didn’t have any willpower. Where decisions needed to be made, over and over, I would always fail, like a smoker forced to sit next to a brand-new packet of cigarettes with a lighter right beside them. It felt impossible, to me, to resist. To resist again and again.

  But then, could anybody coexist in one room with a transcript of their ex-boyfriend’s murder trial and not read it? I couldn’t.

  I made a cup of tea and ran a bath and played two goes on Words with Friends against Kate. And then, trying to distract myself, I sent Audrey a screenshot of a BBC news headline about a man who collected all the meerkats from the annoying adverts, entitling it: ‘Weird Richard II’. But, despite all of this faff, it was inevitable that I would open the parcel and read every word.