White Lies (16 page)

The next doorway takes me two weeks forward into my bathroom. My bandage is loose and there is vomit on the floor. Lydia is a few minutes short of throwing herself at the door to get me to open it. She hammers it with the flats of her hands, calling me things that I know Alex can hear downstairs and will repeat back to me for weeks. I synchronise the shaking of my hands enough to unwind the rest of the dressing and reveal my stinking, gangrenous hand. It smells like fermenting guts and my stomach convulses, emptying itself into the sink and over the side of the bath and onto my bare feet.

I reach behind me and unlock the door so that Lydia won’t break it down.

“Jesus,” she says, through a throat clenched tight to stop her own puke escaping. “I’m calling an ambulance. You fucking idiot.”

I never knew the word ‘stump’ could have such an effect on a person’s masculinity.

Lydia refuses to speak to me from the morning of my amputation to the day I return from the hospital, and even then it is only to tell me to sign on the dole as she dumps a stack of insurance papers in my lap. She kisses me distractedly. She pats rather than hugs, a tense smile struggling to cast off the suspicion that I am punishing myself for something.

Money can’t buy you happiness but insurance can pay off a good chunk of your mortgage and soothe your furrowed brow, while you learn how to button a shirt one-handed.

I wasn’t sad to give up plumbing, spending my hours elbow deep in other people’s waste water, discovering things you wish you hadn’t in their pipes. Once you’ve settled in and they’ve made you the first cup of tea, you become invisible. Something they step around and leave alone to do its business - an innocuous, impotent intruder. They forget that they have secrets to be seen.

My career was a forced apprenticeship, an arranged marriage, because my aunt said I should learn a trade, because: “Nobody needs English Literature as a qualification. You speak English well enough, don’t you?”

One good thing came from it. One shining, stinking nugget at the bottom of all that shit. Deep in the sleep deprivation that comprised the first few months of Alex’s life I was called out to a job by a crying, frantic woman who had water streaming through her bedroom ceiling. The man in the flat above let me in with a grumble and pointed me towards the kitchen where two inches of water covering the floor, before vaulting himself back onto the sofa. I played my inconspicuous part – get the job done, get home – and went upstairs to turn off his water. A growling rose as I reached the landing. An Alsatian squared itself up behind a stairgate fitted across a bedroom doorway. Two more dogs roamed behind it. Shit in various stages of freshness pock-marked the bare floorboards. And in between it all: a child. No more than eighteen months old, in a nappy so full it sagged to its knees. A dummy firmly fixed in its mouth. Eyes that showed no sign of fear, no sign of anything much at all.

The dog lowered its rumble as I approached, but the child moved forwards too and pushed the great hound out of its way with chubby little hands. Close up, the smell was acerbic, sweeping over me and lagging at the back of my tongue. The child raised its arms, a universal toddler demand for ‘up’, and I plucked it out of its cage without a moment’s thought, clutching its cool skin close to my face. It didn’t make a sound, but the dogs did - harsh, scraping warning barks that did their job well. I lowered the child back onto its feet inside the gate, my shivering turning into spasms of horror and rage as I left it there, taking the stairs in two leaps.

“I need something from the van,” I muttered to the bastard on the sofa, stumbling back down to the flat below. The woman with the leaky bedroom listened from the next room as I called social services from her phone and she brought me another cup of tea even though I hadn’t asked for one, holding it out to me as gingerly as if it were a handful of broken glass.

And the changes come ever quicker, electronic jolts that leave me breathless and aching. Did I walk here through perdition or did something push me? I stand at iron-wrought gates and watch a six-year-old Matthew come out of school, dread and guilt swelling together like yeast and sugar - a foul, bubbling bitterness that I try to ignore. When Alex started nursery I mourned his absence until it was time to jog up to collect him. Every hour Matthew spent at school was a relief. Why didn’t I miss him in the same way?

The dressings on my handless wrist are still fresh and I recognise this day, the first as a househusband, a stay at home dad, with Lydia back at work and Alex to myself.

He hangs on my remaining hand, five little fingers wrapped around one of mine, and a gush of sorrow swamps me. Fatherhood came so much more naturally with Alex. He was happy or he was screaming and there was nothing in between - simple lines that could be marked with a rule. I could never predict what would send Matthew into a silent fuming implosion. I never knew how to coax him out of it.

Matthew joins us wordlessly and we turn back down the path, the slow journey home to cartoons and milkshakes and Rich Tea biscuits - a routine to keep us safe. I ask Matthew what he did at school and he says he doesn’t know. We walk at Alex’s pace, jerky sprints and lagging curiosity that incites him to inspect each snail, every garden gate.

Matthew looks over his shoulder at least once a minute, a tic created by my guilty conscience; the overwhelming sense that I am merely his temporary guardian, that Heather will someday return to take over, and that I just need to keep him alive until then. The anticipation builds with every year she is missing until it leeches under his skin and leaves him glancing at the front door and out the lounge window and checking behind curtains when he thinks no-one is watching, forever expecting someone special to appear. Eventually he developed a kind of detachment that required no looking after, a lifelong disappointment that no-one was coming to save him from his father. And then he was an adult, free to leave and hate me forever.

His shoelace flaps around his ankles and I stop him with my spare hand – or what used to be my hand – thumping my stump down on his shoulder, sending a slice of tenderness through blunted nerves. He flinches and looks up at me like he’s done something wrong. I kneel down to retie his laces and immediately realise that it’s not going to work with only four fingers and one thumb. By the time I look up again, Alex has disappeared around the next corner and the sight nearly gives me a stroke. Or perhaps it does. The first of many unnoticed faults in my foundations. The traffic lights turn and the high street lets loose a tumult of impatient after-school traffic. My baby son is beyond my reach and a double dose of adrenaline floods my system – old and new – even though I know what will happen, even though I know we all survive this.

Matthew’s shoe falls right off his foot as I run, practically carrying him along by one wrist, tongue swelling to twice its size and blocking my windpipe, heart bouncing off my ribcage so loudly I can’t tell if it is beeping I hear or a child crying.

We round the corner – six feet travelled in what feels like as many hours – to find Alex standing beneath a leaky drainpipe, hands stretched above his head to catch the drips, laughing to himself. I drop Matthew’s hand and snatch up my smallest son, hear the air being pushed out of him, close my eyes to the wet little palms that grip my neck in surprise. Matthew is crying, trying to keep his shoeless foot off the damp pavement but unable to keep his balance on one leg.

My shame disregards his age and makes me snap at him, pointing out the difference in importance between a shoe and his brother’s life, but I don’t need to. He chides himself in his own way: quiet self-loathing and a fruitless check behind him in case his mother is there. His mother, or anyone else preferable to me. Nana Alice would have spoken softly and carried him back to retrieve his shoe. Lydia would have made a joke and challenged him to hop all the way home. Heather would have loved him like I should have. I clumsily and wordlessly tuck his stupid shoelaces back into his shoe with Alex in my arms. Matthew swallows down his wet-socked discomfort and walks home snivelling through his fury.

I have to wait until we reach the house before the front doorway takes me back and I emerge in the dining room of some pansy-scented hotel full of old people. There’s a lump in my throat and a pounding of blood in my missing hand. A woman who looks just like my dentist smiles at me and I politely ask her where I am, but it only seems to make her want to cry.

Chapter Thirteen

It’s raining and the bus doesn’t come. When I clock in late, my manager gives me the look of death and my brain screams against the inside of my skull, but I nod apologetically and shove my stuff in my locker.

They don’t know about Alex at work. The funeral was on a Saturday and by the time I walked in on Monday morning it was all over. I don’t see the point of milking false sympathy from co-workers I only ever really converse with on Facebook so I say I’m ill, hungover, going through a bad patch with Sabine.

The waiting room is half full. The ticket machine has already fed out twenty-seven tickets - little triangular-nosed pink things, like carnival tokens, except the winner’s prize is a heated one-to-one discussion about housing benefit payments. Their payments aren’t enough, they’re too late, they’re being stopped, or the claimant doesn’t have the right paperwork, they don’t understand the form, they need the money now, for fuck’s sake, not next month. The one unifying factor is that it’s all my fault. Except it’s not. At least in retail the customer is always right - credit notes and refunds and discounts appease an irate public. Here, in the council’s offices, the customer doesn’t know how lucky they are to get any fucking thing at all.

I yank up the blind on my booth and spend a minute adjusting my chair and blinking and blowing my nose before I can bring myself to press the button that tells customer number twenty-eight to come to booth number seven. It’s a student, probably the same age as Clare, with an A4 envelope in his hands so packed full of paperwork that it has split down the side. He approaches with a smugness that suggests he thinks he’s entitled to something he’s not - he’d rather fill in another twelve forms than get a bar job.

He asks how long before he gets the money. I take his papers and stare at nothing in particular on them for longer than is comfortable for him. He checks his phone, pulls out headphones from his bag and wraps them round his neck. I hate him for the simple fact that some twat like this is the reason Clare turned up at my door. He rephrases his initial question to prompt me out of my glaring silence. I want to throw the envelope in his face and pepper him with paper cuts.

I tell him that we’ll send him a letter once we’ve processed his claim. I tell him it might take a couple of weeks. I don’t tell him that it might take a great deal longer than that when I happen to misplace his file. Judging by the newness of his phone, his parents won’t let him starve.

For a moment he seems like he might make a point about the fact that I haven’t even glanced at the documents he’s given me or really once made eye contact; about how the tone of my voice is on an emotional par with the recorded announcement that brought him to my booth. I count the hangnails on my fingers until he goes away.

My phone buzzes against my leg. I shouldn’t answer it, but I do.

Clare says: “I just threw up.”

“You’re always throwing up.”

“I’m lying on the bathroom floor and I can’t get up.”

“Clare, I’m at work.”

“I’m shivering.”

“Go to bed with a bucket.”

She swallows. Grunts.

“Clare?”

She’s crying now, the echoey whines of someone who knows all they can do is wait until the next bout of heaving comes along.

“Clare? I’m at work. Suck on ice cubes if you can’t keep water down.”

She hangs up.

My eyes feel like they’re covered in scales. I knuckle each eyeball until they’re filled with static. I jam the student’s file into a random pigeonhole below my desk but it immediately slides back out and spreads into a fan on the floor. My phone goes off again and somebody nearby tuts.

“Clare? I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

In a voice all tinny and tiny: “I’m really scared.”

“Alright, I’m coming home.”

“Sorry Matt.”

“Shut up.”

I kick the paperwork under my feet into a sort of pile and power-walk to the fire exit. I sit in the dusty stairwell and try not to hyperventilate. The fire escape leads not to safety, but to an enclosed delivery entrance that can only be escaped by dialling the correct code on a rusty old padlock that hangs on the caged retracting door. The code is written on a slip of paper pinned to the notice board two floors above in the back office. The code is wrong. I know because I’ve tried. If there’s a fire, we will all burn with the claim forms.

I haven’t got the energy to lie to HR but it’s too late to say out loud that my brother is dead. A red snowstorm rages behind my eyelids, collating slowly into blackness until for a moment I can imagine I am a tiny cell inside Alex’s body as it shuts down, curiously questioning the numbness, the tiny self-destructive synaptic explosions. Maybe I’m dying. I don’t have the risk factor for a dramatic death like Alex’s, just my father’s wandering path to follow, wading fully clothed into mental breakdown.