White Lies (10 page)

A woman. Standing the wrong side of the locked door. Brown toothed, swarthy, and twisted like willow. A witch, almost certainly.

“Evening,” she said, with a voice like a broken back.

There were no windows in his cell but the chill of the sunset had reached him hours before. He raised a princely eyebrow at her but she said nothing more until he asked, “What is it you want from me?”

“Your fear,” she replied.

He did not understand. The incessant bell tolled reason and thought out of his brain with each sweet-toned peal.

“I’m not afraid,” he muttered, not even believing it himself.

“Don’t you want to know how they’ll do it?” she asked coquettishly.

The prince forced himself to sit up straight, to the fullest height he could manage while shackled to the wall. He had a proud chin - his portraits, now pulled down from the walls of the palace and replaced with his usurper, had always captured it well.

The woman had magic. In the earthen floor she drew visions of his end: the desperate silence of a hanging, the heated knife disembowelling and castrating, the bubble and pitch of burning alive. He kicked the images away like a drowning man jerking his last.

She watched his bloodless face, the battering pattern of his heart. “No fear?” she said.

The prince shook his head once each side.

“Well then,” she sniffed, “I’ll leave you to your death.”

As she turned away, he wondered how she would leave – how indeed she got inside – with no keys, with no sign that the guard outside his cell had any idea she was even there. “Wait,” he said. He didn’t feel strong enough to witness a woman walking through a solid door.

“Yes?”

“I am,” he said slowly. “Afraid. I’m terrified.”

She smiled.

“I can make it all disappear.”

And she did. And it did.

#

The beeping won’t stop. I am standing at the foot of Mother Whistler’s bed and though her lips aren’t moving I can hear her voice as clear as the bells of the prison tower.

“Is this what you wanted?” she asks.

I shake my head once each side. One, two. No. No.

She doesn’t smile. Her machines are furious. Red and green lights illuminate the pitted and sunken flesh of her cheeks in stuttering flashes. “You still have to pay,” she says, without saying anything out loud.

I can hear the nurses coming to turn off the noise, to return the technology to a placid hum, to tuck her up and chase me away. “How much?” I ask, just as silently.

“Two.”

“Two what?”

“Sons, Peter. Two of your finest boys.”

“But I don’t have any children.”

I can hear her laughter above the bleeping. For a second the corner of her mouth twitches upwards. “Oh Peter.”

“What if I say no?” I ask her. The darkness cloys at my skin, seeping between my pyjamas and my nakedness like a coating of cement, turning me to stone with every second her eyes fix on mine.

“You won’t,” she says.

Chapter Nine

The first time I told him I thought it would be the only time. Angie and Sabine came with me and we lined up like dominoes outside Dad’s bedroom, waiting for the catalyst, for a giant finger to flick us over. We stood in height order, tallest to smallest - a space missing for Alex who would have stood at the end of the line, ahead of me, his bony shoulder blades poking out like bird beaks, the three moles on the back of his neck forming a triangle, his hair protruding at odd angles around his double crown. But if he were still here then we wouldn’t have any reason to deliver any news.

We hadn’t rehearsed this ridiculous line-up. We’d simply come to a gentle, otherworldly, swaying stop at Dad’s door. We stood there for at least three minutes in silence while I picked at the inside seam of my jeans pocket and Angie cleared her throat of phlegm that wasn’t there and Sabine shrank into herself like a retreating snail. The woman in the room next to Dad’s hummed along to David Bowie on the radio, muttering crossword clues and shaking out her newspaper.

A nurse walked past and nodded to Angela. As if it was some sort of prearranged signal, Angela took a loud intake of breath and put a hand on my back. “Right,” she said. “Let’s… ” But she never finished the suggestion.

Sabine let out a sigh like a landslide. There was a lump in my throat that was not from tears or nausea but almost as if my body had decided it would rather not breathe than do what it was about to do. Angela had stalled. Her fingers contracted around the back of my jumper. It had to be me. I had to lead the way. I felt my entire weight fall into my shoes and pushed open the door to my father’s room.

Inside was the kind of quiet that made skin prickle, the kind that creates an inexplicable urge to cough. We filed in like naughty schoolchildren and stood in front of him, blocking his view of the television.

“Hi Dad,” I said.

He looked up, not bothering to smile, then returned his attention to the TV where a celebrity chef was making hollandaise against a timer. I wonder if Dad guessed - if he mentally ticked off the various possibilities and worked out the reason why Alex wasn’t there.

“Hi Dad,” I said again.

“Hmm?” he said.

I stood between Sabine and Angela. They squeezed my hands simultaneously. I tongued my ulcers and tried to remember the series of sentences I had prepared for the occasion, stock stuff from soaps and films and dramas, like: “There’s been an accident,” or “Something terrible has happened.” Or maybe: “I know he was your favourite son but at least you still have me, Dad.”

“You alright?” he asked, leaning around to keep his eyes on the telly, reaching unconsciously for his tobacco packet and flicking out a Rizla.

Angela squeezed harder. My knuckles jarred against each other. “No,” I said, “no, we’re not alright.”

“Oh?” Dad said, mildly amused. “What have I done now? What are you all doing here?” He eyed Sabine, in particular, suspiciously.

“Peter,” Angela began, but I crushed her fingers in mine and she stopped, water pooling in her lower eyelids.

“Alex had something to tell you,” I said.

“Matt,” Sabine said under her breath, “don’t.”

“He came to see me last night.”

“Matthew… ” Angela this time.

Even I’m not that much of an arsehole. My dad calmly rolled himself a cigarette and pretended he wasn’t still watching the chef whisking manically. I couldn’t tell him that his prodigal son had not sprung from his loins. He’d have found a way to blame me. I shook my head sharply, like a bull about to charge, trying to throw off the rage.

“Well, where is he then?” Dad asked.

Words started coming out of me in a voice that was a few millimetres above a whisper. They should have been soft but they came out completely devoid of feeling:

“Alex had a brain aneurysm. Probably been there for years. It ruptured. He died last night on the street outside my flat.”

All three of them watched my straight face, waiting for more. I shrugged.

“And that’s it.”

It was an echo of the detached doctor who gave the news to me – more guilt than sorrow – although at least the doctor managed a kind of numb empathy. I missed by a mile. I was a human fucking telegram. No sobbing, no breaking down. I was not bereft, destroyed, hysterical. There was no keening or beating of my man boobs while I told a man his son was dead. It just wasn’t normal and I could tell they all found it utterly repugnant.

Dad looked across our expressions, moving along the line and back again, measuring something that I couldn’t gauge. Then he stood, hoisting his cigarette in my face. “’Scuse me. Going to have this outside,” he said, and shuffled past us into the corridor.

“Peter!” Angela’s voice squealed unpleasantly.

Sabine turned and punched me as hard as she could on the shoulder, though I didn’t really feel it. “Are you completely dead inside?”

“What the fuck did I do?” I yelled back at her.

Angela had fallen into a crouch and was pushing her palms into her eye sockets as if she could erase her own face by sheer force. She hardly ever cries, but when she does she sounds like a walrus in heat.

“What’s going on in there?” the woman next door hollered. “Some of us are trying to bloody read.”

#

They tried to give Angela compassionate leave but she wouldn’t take it. She was back at the home within a week, perhaps thinking no-one else would be able to look after Dad as well as she could. But he didn’t need looking after. He was still refusing to acknowledge the news of Alex’s death; he was completely unbothered by a situation he was blind to, albeit confused as to why Angie burst into tears whenever she tried to speak to him. She told me she couldn’t face telling him again. She said she felt like she was drowning whenever she looked at him.

“You’re going to make yourself ill,” I said. But really I was just jealous of how easily her emotions poured out of her. I hadn’t even told my boss. I was still thinking about practical things like picking up milk and butter on the way home, and where Alex’s funeral should be, and forgetting to record the final episode of that documentary series on all the different ways global warming is going to fuck up the world, and whether I had to ring the utilities companies to stop the gas and water and electricity at Alex’s empty flat. It didn’t matter how many times I said it out loud –
my brother is dead
– it was just four little words in a line. Subject, verb. This thing is that. I pretended I was being strong for Angie but they knew. They knew.

Angela wouldn’t stop asking: “How did it happen? How did he fall?” Tell me again, how he hit the wall, at what angle, was he knocked unconscious, did he cry out, did he bleed? Never the ones she wanted to ask: “Did you push him? Did you hit him? Did you kill him?” I had to rely on the fact that she trusted what Sabine and Jamie had seen, trusted the police, trusted my witnesses.

“He tried to hit me and he fell. He fell and hit his head.” Sentences with the simplicity of a child learning to read. Lies are straightforward. The truth is complicated. The police were less concerned about the details than she was. Once the postmortem results came back they stopped asking anything.

A bubble. In his head. That’s all it took. Here one second, screaming in my face, gone the next, dying a hundred feet from where I knelt blotting up orange juice from my carpet. I didn’t even hear the ambulance. Jamie didn’t think to come back up to the flat to tell me, even then. No, a payphone call was all I deserved. He took those last moments, he took the time of death announcement, he took Alex’s last words. He was there. He stole my brother’s death away.

The first time I told my Dad about Alex wasn’t the hardest. It got worse over the next few visits as he folded the information away into a deep inner pocket and I was lulled into expecting a reaction of intense denial. But the fourth time was the charm. He heard it all. Took it all in, swallowed it down like crushed glass. He got hung up about the fighting part, even though it could hardly have been called that. Dad’s eyes stopped blinking until they were so full of water he couldn’t possibly have been able to see.

“Why were you arguing?” he whispered.

“He was drunk.”

“And he fell.”

There’s the tone of disbelief. The same as Angela. They need a villain.

“He lost his balance,” I said. “They said the aneurysm could have ruptured at any time, it might not have been caused by the blow to the head.”
I’m
not even comforted by the word-for-word recitation of the doctor’s assurances but I have to say it. It’s my only defence. “It was a time bomb.” And now all I can think is thank God Dad wasn’t Alex’s dad and there’s no secret hereditary risk of exploding brain death in my blood, too.

It was the second time I’ve ever seen my dad cry - a terrible silent weeping that cements just how far apart we are, have always been. I did the same thing I did when Lydia died and I walked into the bathroom to find him sitting on the edge of the bath with her toothbrush in his hand. I sat opposite him and I watched as tears and snot became indistinguishable on his upper lip and he licked them away. I watched until I couldn’t look any more and then I stared into my lap. Eventually he stopped and I said, “I’m sorry,” because it was the only thing I could give him. My guilt.

I gave it to Angela, too, as she tried to work out which was less painful: telling Dad his son was dead or worrying about where Clare was. None of us had heard from her since the night of my birthday and Angela shifted between reassuring anger and uncharacteristic panic. Clare must have missed a hundred calls but neither of us wanted to leave a message saying her uncle was dead.

“She’s just pissed off with me,” Angie said on the second day. “She’ll be at Becca’s. I think she snuck into the flat when I was at work to get some clean clothes.” On the third day she called the police. I was glad then, that my dad had retreated into his safe little coward’s denial. I imagined him officially reporting my mother missing when I was three days old. I tried to picture his face superimposed over Angela’s sleep-deprived eyes, grainy and sore, over the wrinkles that sprang into life around her mouth overnight. Three days makes you a missing person. Thirty-five years makes you a ghost.