White Lies (14 page)

None of the boxes are labelled, it’s all junk we stuffed into cardboard coffins in the hope that we wouldn’t need to look at it again. Sabine and I were the ones to clear Dad’s house while Angie “settled him in”, as if she were putting a toddler to bed. Alex turned up when it was all done, when the father king has been usurped by his meddling children and deposited in his living grave, lined with knitted blankets and pamphlets about coping with dementia. Alex took him out to the pub for the afternoon and Angela and the nurses spoke bright-eyed about how Dad was more like his old self afterwards. Then the prodigal son fucked off back to London and we were left to stack Dad’s life into this little metal cell.

Clare comes across a box of photo albums and, just like Sabine did, quickly discovers that there are pretty much no photos of me before the age of four. Dad always said that Nana Alice kept them all, but when she died we found only a handful, sealed inside an envelope with Dad’s address on it. I explain this to my niece when she asks and she frowns as if failing to quite comprehend. “Grandad didn’t take any?”

“Grandad was in shock for about five years after I was born,” I say. “I don’t know, maybe Alice had more but we never found them.” Maybe she sent them to my mum. Maybe everyone was writing to her and nobody thinks that this information is something I might want to fucking know. The box I’m searching through contains only clothes and random kitchen utensils and I shove it off the stack and kick it into the corner. A stove-top kettle falls out and lands on my foot and even though it didn’t hurt, I yell and swipe it up and throw it as hard as I can into the metal wall. Clare smirks for a moment before flipping forward a few pages in the album.

“Grandma took lots though,” she says, nodding at the group pictures of Angie and me and baby Alex, my father lurking in the background of some, making it obvious who was behind the camera.

“Lydia? Yeah, she did. She practically papered the dining room in photos.”

Clare’s eyes lift in a smile, “I remember that. I loved looking at those. Mum says I looked like Alex when I was a kid. Only with blonde hair.”

I’d never really thought about it but she did. Sometimes I forget that I’m related to any of them at all. Except I’m not really, am I? Not Angie, not Clare, not Lydia, and not even Alex. Just Dad. “Yeah,” I say. “Just the same.”

Clare’s smile drops and she tosses the photo album at my feet. I never quite know what I’ve done or said wrong but I know the signs. I’m supposed to say something, I think. “So… ”

“What?”

“Are you going to ever talk to your mum again?”

“No.”

“Right. That’s realistic.”

“Shut up.”

“Okay.”

She pulls out the rest of the photo albums, frisbeeing them carelessly at my shins. “If you want to get rid of me… ”

“That’s not what I meant.” I try to give her a hard, meaningful stare but I don’t think it works. She stops throwing things at me, at least. One box and she’s already had enough. She sags against the wall and picks at a sticker that says: One man’s storage is another man’s treasure.

“Of course I’m going to talk to her,” she says. “Just not yet. It’ll never end, you know? She never stops pushing you. I just want a break before it all hits the fan.”

“I know,” I tell her. She nods, lets the corners of her mouth flick upwards for a second. She doesn’t look nineteen in the same way Alex never looked like a child. Too little fat in the cheeks, too much of Angela’s weariness. I don’t want her to end up like either of them.

We keep digging in silence. I find a neat little box that Sabine must have packed – stuff from the war, from Dad’s father – browned paperwork and army pocketbooks, patches from his uniform, telegrams. And underneath, a soft-focus picture from his parents’ wedding day. My dad looks a little bit like both of them; taller than his father but the same hairline; a wider face than his mother but the same nose, same forehead, same tightness of a smile held too long. I throw everything into a carrier bag and open the next box, and the next, but there’s nothing secret or dramatic or conspiratorial, nothing that even suggests my mother ever existed. No letters at all, from anyone. Dad was as useless as communicating on paper as he is with his vocal chords.

Clare gets bored, hungry, irritable, and needs to wee. She wanders off to find a toilet and I tell her I’ll meet her at the car. There’s one more box to look through. I recognise it with the kind of lurch that hits you in the guts when you’re about to fall. It’s the same faded box that lived at the top of Angie’s wardrobe for years - a horrible, pointless, gloating box that I didn’t even know existed until Alex told me about it when I was twelve. He’d had a good sift through, not really understanding what the piles of paperwork meant, but knowing that it was something that could hurt me. He showed me where it was and then went and told Dad that I was snooping. I got a fat ear and no pudding and I never saw the box again.

I open it up but I don’t bother to read the reports, there are too many and they all say the same thing and nothing at all. Police reports about my mum - red tape and the procedural humouring of a sad little man and his oblivious little baby. If I had a lighter I’d turn the box into kindling - let the whole room go up, scorching the yellow walls black and reducing all this pathetic shit to soot. Paperwork doesn’t matter, photos don’t matter, letters don’t matter. What matters is what my father knows. What he never told the police, or me, or anyone.

#

All I know about my missing mother is that after the birth she needed a lot of stitches – as Nana Alice used to delight in telling me – due to my abnormally large head. And as soon as my mother could walk, albeit wincing, she was gone, leaving me in my little fish tank cot in the maternity ward. No-one thought to stop her while she dressed, packed and limped straight out of the hospital without her baby, and no-one has seen her since. A little boy with a bowling ball for a head was not, apparently, what she had ordered.

Alex took his mum’s slender, athletic genes. I was given stocky solidity with a tendency for spilling over my jeans, just like my fat mother. People always imagine that she was some young, thin, beautiful, glamorous thing, and that was why she ran - looking for something better than a grumpy old fucker of a husband and a misshapen kid. People assume that if she were just fat and plain she would have stayed, would have been grateful for what she had, no matter how unhappy it made her. Or people just assume that she was mental, and, by extension, that I might end up the same way too. All I can guess is that she believed disappearing was preferable to my squashed up newborn face, and ran as fast as her thunder thighs would take her.

Alex used to joke that it was a wonder no-one could find her, after all, it couldn’t be that hard to miss her. He loved telling people how she ran away, like it said something about me. He stopped after Lydia died, but by then he didn’t need to. We’d both lost our mothers, but where he had pathos, I was just unwanted.

I’ve given three pounds a month to a missing persons charity since I was sixteen, a little fuck-you secret from my dad. I once suggested the idea to him and he looked so lividly lost for words that I blushed and tried to leave the room whispering, “Never mind.”

He pulled me back by my sleeve, held me against the door frame, let his voice drop to a rustle, every word a threat. It’s the only time I can remember him saying something to my face about my mother’s disappearance, right in my face, bitter breath filling my nostrils: “What is the point in looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found?”

For my three quid I receive a newsletter every month, pages and pages of lost faces. The problem with taking an active interest in missing people is that you see them everywhere. At the bus stop: Sylvia, thirty-four, missing since December ’12. Serving me pints at The Hare and Hound: Ben, twenty-one, missing since July ’07. Asking me for spare change outside Starbucks: Gemma, fourteen, missing since October ’10. Ethan, twenty-nine, missing since August ’04, sold me a digital camera in the January sales. Kathryn, forty-nine, missing since spring ’98, gave me her condolences when I bought flowers from her for my brother’s funeral.

But never Heather, sixty-five, mousey blonde hair, brown eyes, five foot two inches tall, approximately fourteen stone, missing since November ’71, last seen wearing a long black skirt, purple top and blue denim jacket.

I don’t bother reading them anymore. Always the same statistics. Most missing people come home within seventy-two hours, but not Mum. Most cases are solved between the police and families and charities, but not Mum’s. The longer they’re gone, the more likely they are to turn up dead. Or not turn up at all. Like Mum. The ever-present disclaimer; terms and conditions for hopeful relatives.

I spent a lot of time imagining the different ways she might have died. Always tragic, always in the middle of a desperate struggle to get back to her baby. It had all been a terrible mistake. I planned expeditions to find her, to rescue her from kidnappings and torturers, aliens and villains. Even in my daydreams I never got there in time. It was easier if she were dead. I knew that. I just wanted to know how. And why.

I checked under bushes on my way to school, peeked through boarded-up windows, poked at stream beds with sticks. I learned the odds of finding her body in different states of decomposition and wondered if I’d recognise her corpse from the few photos I’d seen. I crept into corners at the library with books on embalming and unexplained murders, making notes on how fast a dead body can decompose. If she’d been buried six feet underground, it would take more than two years - if she’d been embalmed properly and in a coffin, it might take decades. A shallow grave could take just six months. Decomposition of her body would occur twice as fast in the air than under water, and four times as fast as underground. Heat would speed up decay and cold would delay it. I pictured her mummified in a desert, frozen and emulsified halfway up a mountain. Intrepid Heather, one fateful last adventure, destined for tragedy.

I told Sabine all of this, not long after we first met. She seemed the type of person who would not be overly disturbed. She sighed and kissed my cheek. “If you say so, Matt.”

I waved away her incredulous expression, pretended the point was moot, “I mean, no matter what happened to her, wherever she died, she’ll be a skeleton by now anyway.”

“That’s all very well,” she said. “But what if she’s still alive?”

Chapter Twelve

When the police stopped looking for Heather I found someone who would continue the search, albeit with a slightly different approach. No-one knew what Gloria did. I explained her away as an old friend, a colleague of Heather’s that I’d kept in touch with. Moral support in a thin disguise. People talked - moving onto the next one so soon after she was gone? But it wasn’t anything romantic at first, just desperation. It was only after Alex was born that things became adulterous, but if Lydia ever suspected what I did with Gloria she was only half right. She would have laughed at the real reason for our monthly meetings at Gloria’s mousehole of a flat.

I found her number in the Yellow Pages a few weeks after they finished investigating me for bodies under the patio and motives for violence, after they dropped Heather’s case like a punctured ball, after the solicitor told me that I could officially mark her down as deceased and cash in on the life insurance. Gloria listened to my garbled explanation on the phone and said, “Come and see me tomorrow.”

I fall into tomorrow with a click of the knees and a lightness that reminds me how skinny I became after Heather left, as if my bones might break into little pieces at the slightest knock. I stand outside Gloria’s place under a black, wet sky that looks about to collapse. If I hadn’t known it was there I might have walked right past it. Her flat barely fits in between a bookies and a laundrette. The building is covered with scaffolding that seemed to have always been part of the structure, though I never saw anyone working on it. Visiting Gloria feels more like coming home than returning to my own ghosted house.

She lets me in by the peeling, warped side door and nods unsmilingly when I tell her who I am, why I’m here. I expected more showmanship. She lacks a certain flamboyance that I thought was a prerequisite; she is almost disturbingly unassuming, standing there in leggings and a cardigan that reaches her knees, neatly brushed hair curling under her chin, the smell of a casserole snaking down the communal stairs behind her. She leads me up to her flat, aiming a gentle nudging kick at a slow old dog attempting to escape the front door, and tells me to wait in the living room while she turns off the cooker. This, at least, is slightly more appropriate: lamps draped with silk scarves, a hazardous amount of candles, a cloud of incense and a red light bulb that smooths the grooves in our skin and dilates our pupils to monstrous size.

I remain standing in the doorway until she pokes me with a knitting needle to move further into the room. I take a seat on the sofa beneath a four-foot fish tank that appears to be empty, but into which she sprinkles a pinch of fish flakes, reaching over my head on bare tiptoes, brushing against the side of my head with her armpit. She lays a ball of wool and her needles on the back of an armchair and settles into it, resting her head on the knitting with a guttural sigh. “Peter,” she murmurs, “I don’t have much for you, but you want to give me your money anyway, don’t you?”