White Lies (11 page)

On the fourth night, I answered a knock at my door at a quarter to midnight and there Clare stood, looking like she wanted to fall down and sleep in the doorway. “Clare, what the fuck?”

“Can I come in? It’s freezing.”

“It’s November and you’re not wearing a coat. Of course you’re freezing. Are you okay? Have you talked to your mum? Where the fuck have you been?”

She edged past me and folded herself up like a praying mantis on the armchair, knees up to her chin, arms twisted around her ankles. She frowned up at the hole in the plasterboard. “What happened to your wall?”

#

I let her stay. I don’t know what she and Angela argued about in that restaurant, but Clare refused to have any contact with her mum and begged me to let her sleep at mine. I couldn’t say no. I could barely follow my own conscience, let alone tell a teenager what to do.

She set up camp on the sofa and only left it to prowl the kitchen. Alex had been dead six days. I sat with my back to the dented wall and stared bleakly at my niece while she made a brief circuit of the kitchen cupboards before turning to face me accusingly.

“There’s no food in this fucking place.”

I nodded to the coffee table and the bowl of sad-looking fruit upon it. Every few weeks I attempted to ease my pizza-guilt by filling the end compartment of the trolley with fruit, which proceeded to turn white, then green, then static with fur, before melting quietly into the bowl.

She cast me a loathing look and picked out a clean satsuma, studying it with deep distrust. I watched in dread as she began to peel it. She struggled to flick a strip of pith from her fingernail and her sigh came out gritty.

“There’s too much fucking white stuff on it.”

I considered my reply, anticipated her reaction, and said it anyway, “You’ve got to work for your food, that’s the fun of fruit.”

Scorn rose from her skin like steam - distilled abhorrence concentrated entirely upon my face. “You think you’re so fucking funny, don’t you?”

I tried to smile, as if I wasn’t terrified of her. “It used to be easy to make you laugh.”

I still think of her as the three-year-old who dissolved into hysterics at even the suggestion of a wiggly-fingered tickle. For a fraction of a second I considered leaning over and blowing a raspberry on her stomach. I actually jolted in my seat to stop myself. She looked at me as if I had just vomited on her shoes.

Keys scraped in the lock and my shoulders fell back in relief as Sabine walked in, a couple of Tesco bags in each hand. She dumped them on the counter and stood back as Clare descended, lobbing the satsuma, half-peeled, in the bin. Sabine shot me a look full of sharp and pointy objects and extracted a bottle of wine from the decimated shopping.

“What’s for dinner?” Clare asked her.

“I’m not your mother,” Sabine said.

“No, but you
are
my host.”

“Oh, you’re a guest are you? I was under the impression this was some kind of tactical occupation.” Sabine poured two glasses to the brim and passed one to me before going straight to the bedroom and shutting herself in. Clare distributed an entire packet of cheese spread onto four pieces of toast.

“Have you talked to your mum?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why won’t you tell me what happened?”

“She’s a bitch.”

“She’s not a bitch. Clare, her brother just died, give her a break.” Funny thing: it sounded sadder when it was happening to someone else.

Clare stuffed half a piece of toast into her mouth and blinked furiously at the ceiling, forcing away the water in her eyes as she tried to swallow. “I know. I just can’t face having to talk about… stuff.”

I took two deep gulps of my wine and winced before I managed to say it. “Clare, you can’t stay here forever.”

She put down the toast and turned away from me, sniffing loudly and wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands. I let my head drop back against the back of the armchair. “Clare… ”

“No, I know, I know,” she said, in a little voice high up in her throat. “I’m sorry. I know
she
doesn’t want me here.” She jerked her head towards the closed bedroom door at Sabine.

“No, it’s not that. I mean, why here? Why aren’t you staying with friends or… Do you have a boyfriend?” And I realised I had no idea what my niece’s life was like. I didn’t even know what she was studying.

Clare brought her plate over and sat on the armrest next to me. She stuck her hand deep inside her bag and brought out something covered in tissue, cupped gently in her hands. “I thought you’d be the nicest to me,” she said.

I leaned backwards slightly, watching the thing in her hands closely in case it was about to jump up and attach itself to my face. “What’s that?”

She unwrapped the tissue and showed me.

“Shit,” I said.

#

Seven days after my birthday and Alex’s deathday, we gathered in a cold crematorium that smelled oppressively of lavender and saltwater. Music piped out of the walls almost beyond the range of human hearing, producing an effect of uncertainty - a paranoia that perhaps some sort of odourless sedative was being vented into the room along with the music.

The guests unconsciously segregated themselves either side of the aisle into family and friends invited by me and Angela on the right, and friends known only to Jamie, rounded up and scraped into suits on the left. The room’s muffled quiet was punctuated by the brief exchange of sympathetic smiles and surreptitious stares directed at us, the immediate family, checking for signs of devastation.

I stood with Sabine, Angela and Clare in the front row, enjoying the feel of the carved wooden handrail in front of me. I had no uncertainty where my perceptions came from, I was one hundred per cent sure they were born of the quarter of a bottle of malt whiskey I had sipped my way through an hour before. Angela and Clare had gone on ahead to the crematorium while a funeral car with a silent driver took me to pick up my father from the home. We’d waited in the car park while I drank for twenty minutes before calling the reception from my mobile – ten metres away – to ask them to bring Dad out.

My mouth was dry, bitter, and one of my eyes wanted – in an amiable sort of way – to veer slightly to the right and peruse the fake marble pillar there, while the other fixed adamantly on the velvet curtains in front of me.

Clare started crying even before the music got loud enough to provoke the tragic effect it had been composed to convey. A woman in a badly-tailored suit and hair too short for her square face came to stand at the lectern and told us all to sit down. I sighed a full-body sigh and fidgeted on the pew, finding my breathing heavier and noisier than it should be. Someone shut the big double doors at the back of the room, which had somehow been engineered to close in the most respectful way possible: a single modest click. Angela leaned towards my ear, gestured to the empty space next to me and whispered worriedly, “Where’s your dad?”

I swivelled round and swung my eyes over to where my father’s fake hand rested on the very back pew, the rest of him obviously there too, standing as far away from the action as possible and grimacing at the backs of everybody’s heads.

I nodded at him, Angela sent him a supportive smile and we turned back to listen to the service, which was cut short in its prime by someone noticing the fact that the father of the deceased had collapsed, suffering his fourth stroke of the year. Unconsciousness spared him the crunch of his wrist fracturing as he hit the ground.

The two strokes before this one had been so miniscule that he’d gone about his day as normal, albeit with a headache and some blurred vision. Both had occurred in the nursing home – a little less mobility, a little more moodiness, a little further into confusion – bit by bit, each one pushing his brain one notch higher on the stairlift to uselessness.

The first had left him on the kitchen floor of his flat, covered in milk. He must have watched the spilled bottle fill the grout lines of the tiles as he lay there, listening to Angela stack his answer machine with messages.

Later, we watched the CT scanner rings rotate slowly around him and listened to the feedback of a tannoy somewhere in the hospital. The doctors chicken-and-egged the dementia and the stroke, agreeing eventually that they had most likely conspired hand in hand to floor him; to take away coherent speech for a week and a half; to insert a tremor into his knees when he stood alone. Over the next seven months he got worse at hiding the anomalies and mistakes, and eagle-eyed Angela knew exactly what to look for. Then he forgot where he kept the baked beans and I betrayed him.

The paramedics picked him up off the crematorium floor and Angela went with him to the hospital as I watched my brother’s body roll down the conveyor to the fire and Clare gripped my arm so tight she left fingerprint bruises.

Chapter Ten

The doorways are getting closer together. Some days each one I pass through will take me somewhere new, somewhere old, somewhere grey. And I am getting slower, less able to escape the siren’s hum of the doors when they call. I am doubly crippled these days; one arm clamped inside a ridiculous plaster appendage, and the other missing a hand. Some doors lead back to a time of plenty: eight fingers, two thumbs, two hands, two wives, three children. I judge by the sweetness of the air whether it will be a joyful journey or a penance. These days, mostly, it is the latter.

Tonight a slow shuffle through the bathroom doorway leaves me shivering on the other side, standing head-bowed outside a garden shed, thirty years before my prostate nags me to urinate six times a night. For a moment all I can feel is a nameless gut-wrenching guilt before the rest comes into focus, before I properly gauge where I am. Then memory moves my hand to action and I slip the shed key underneath a rhubarb pot so Lydia won’t find it. She’s not like Heather, who would always defer to me in any situation requiring a spade or power tools. Lydia is far more inclined to just grab a hammer and get stuck in. I know hiding the key is futile but under the pot it goes. My body moves without me willing it, as if I’m not even inside.

I can see my neighbour Graham pulling up leeks next door. My knees pop as I straighten up and he looks over, calling “Peter.” Hearing his voice stops me like a bullet.

I can’t help but grin to unnerve him. I let the awkwardness settle before heading for the back door.

“Peter? Do you want some of these?” he says, and I can’t stop myself from glancing back to see him hoisting a handful of soily leeks over the fence.

“We’re okay, thanks.” We are okay. We don’t need his leeks.

“I’ve got a glut. Have some.”

My memory says that I refused them with a shake of my head and a backwards wave but this time I am fuelled by thirty-five years of rage and I stop and turn and stare. Graham’s face glows pink in the low light. I study his features for a moment, something I never would have done before; I always found it so hard to look him in the eye. My body tries to move but I force it into submission by convincing it that its feet are pegged to the ground. It twitches, conflicted. I tell it to behave or I’ll piss myself. I never did make it to the bathroom back in the nursing home.

Graham watches me, arm still outstretched, vegetables dangling flaccidly from his hands. I jog over to take the cold leeks from him and grainy earth tumbles down into my sleeve. “Thank you,” I say.

“Not a problem.”

I’m stuck again, cradling the leeks in my arms, smiling with no trace of pleasantry at my increasingly disturbed neighbour. He clears his throat. “So… ”

“What?”

Graham tries to make it sound nonchalant: “That time of year again.”

I pretend I don’t know what he means. “November? Yep, it seems to happen every year.”

He falters. Makes a new attempt: “Matthew’s birthday.”

“Saturday.”

“Ahh. Five?”

“That’s right.”

“Five years… ” he says, like a wistful grandfather, like he knows what it’s like to have an almost five-year-old.

I wait for the rest. His mouth opens and shuts like a faulty trap door. I flick a tiny worm off the end of one of the leeks. Then it comes, in fits and starts: “Have you…? Heard anything new?”

“About what?”

“About - Well. I mean about your wife. About Heather, I mean. Have you heard anything?”

I laugh. I don’t mean to but it just falls out of my mouth. Graham recoils, almost ducks behind the fence. I lean closer, crushing the leeks against the slatted border that separates our little yards. Too close. We’ve been too close for years, never saying what needed to be said, never looking each other in the face.

“Five years, Graham,” I say. “No. I’ve not heard one bloody thing in five years, and I don’t expect to. Ever.” I smile again, enjoying the discomfort it causes, and dump the leeks back over his side of the fence. They splay into an awkward fan on his boots. He drops his gardening gloves where he stands and turns to go, and it’s my turn to call after him: “But if I do, you’ll be the first to know.”

#

Two weeks later the house was overrun by sugar-high five-year-olds, chasing the birthday boy, beating him with balloons, fighting over a newspaper-wrapped pass the parcel, collapsing in front of a video of Robin Hood when Lydia could take no more. She’d made him a cake in the shape of a hedgehog. Angela had sensibly opted to go and play at a friend’s house rather than suffer the chaos. Alex, who was learning to walk at the time, was knocked over by the whirlwind of children and split his lip on the hearth. I retired to the pub after an hour.