White Lies (2 page)

Deep, glutinous memories. A squat, thatched bungalow perched on an island of green, bypass all around, the rumbling white noise of traffic topped with
Sounds of the Sixties
on repeat. Walking the perimeter of the dining area, tapping on wood-panelled walls, hoping to discover hidden secret passages to smuggler caves. Reaching skinny arms into snooker table pockets, trying to guess the colour of each ball before it emerged, the thud against soft green felt, the sluggish trajectory, the mesmeric roll. Once you let go there is no way of influencing the journey. Studded leather benches in muffled little booths, all three kids to a side, Dad and Lydia on the other, Nana Alice on the corner, next to me. Every public holiday: a phone call from my mother’s mother that made Dad squeeze his eyes into a wince, or provoked a catty, overenthusiastic, “Wonderful!” from Lydia. The Boatman, for lunch. Something with chips and peas. Orange and lemonade. Steamed pudding with a custard moat. Bellyache, holding seatbelts away from anguished stomachs and full bladders on the ride home.

Dad lifts his eyes from the floor but his expression doesn’t change.

“You were mortified, I think,” I say. “She demanded to look round the kitchen to see if they were really deep-frying cardboard back there. They ended up giving us all free ice cream sundaes and - ” And all memories come circling back to the same resolution. I toss the card back onto the chest of drawers. “And Alex knocked mine over and I cried.”

Dad looks back at his knees, notices the remote control, tries out a few buttons, receiving the reward of a high-pitched squeal as the ancient set buzzes to life and the screen fills with electronic snow.

I raise my voice to match the weather report coming through the static. “He said we should feed it to the fish in the pond, and you and Lydia laughed.”

“ -
brisk easterly wind with persistent snow for parts of East Anglia -
”

“And I couldn’t stop crying, and you slapped me on the leg to make me shut up, and then you all ate your fucking ice cream while I watched, until Angie gave me half of hers. Remember that, Dad?”

He’s looking at me now, eyes moist and jerky with uncertainty.

“ -
remaining dull and cold, with light sleet across the South for most of the morning -
”

“You remember who I am?” I ask.

A dip of the head, “Matthew.”

“And Angela?”

Another nod.

“And Alex?”

“When is he coming to see me?”

Fuck. I can’t say it again. “I don’t know.”

Dad knows, I know he does, he just won’t let himself remember. The agony is there in his eyes, in the twitching of his Adam’s apple, in the unconscious clench of his arthritic fist. We’re similar for the first time - all the physical symptoms of grief with none of the emotion. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s not that it doesn’t hurt, but I just haven’t worked out how to mourn for someone I hated.

I wasn’t with my brother when he died, but I can see it happen every time I try to sleep. And if I sleep, when I sleep, he’s there, cursing my name. Of course he fucking is. Screaming ancient, nameless, binding curses as he stumbles down the concrete steps from my flat to the frost-dusted street outside, cursing me right up until the moment something inside his head implodes.

He collapses as though he is folding into three pieces – at the knees and waist – landing sideways onto gravel and glass and fag ends and rain. His head bounces off the tarmac. His brain is bleeding and his body doesn’t know what to do with itself. Pulses of steaming blood silence him, deafen him with soft pink swollen tissue. I see him from above, lying there. I hear him whispering, even after the scene ends and I know he’s dead. He never passed up a chance to cause me pain when he was alive. Why shouldn’t he do it from the grave, too?

The nurse comes early today and sing-songs the little magic spell that rouses us from our mutual silence and allows me to leave.

“Lunch time, Peter!” As if Dad’s been waiting for this bland, overcooked meal his whole life. She apologises, tells me I’ll have to get going, and I feign reluctance with a sad smile - for her sake, not his. Or maybe for my sake, so I don’t seem like a total bastard. No, please, let me stay and atrophy with these walking corpses while they drool gravy down their hairy chins.

I pat him on the shoulder as I pass. He’s not quite one of them yet. He looks up at me, showing his teeth in a tentative smile, as if he can’t remember if I’m here to fix a tap or rob him. He could be a poster boy for gum disease with that mouth. I resolve to floss twice daily, hit genetics where it hurts.

“Time to go, Dad. I’ll see you next week.”

He scratches his right nostril and turns to the window, back into the foggy depths of his head. The nurse is all rosy-cheeked sympathy but she stinks of cigarettes and bleach.

I’m almost at reception when Angela appears out of nowhere and grabs me, perpetuating my fear that one day I will look behind me as I walk through the nursing home’s gaudily wallpapered corridors to see a horde of growling, crawling zombies, eager for flesh. A cold flush of sweat ripples down my back.

“Jumpy,” she says.

“Zombie,” I mutter.

“How’s your dad?”

“The same.”

“He’s having a good day today,” she claims, though I can see she doesn’t believe it either. She lances me with a significant look. “Did you tell him about Alex?”

“I tried. He didn’t cry today. And I told him about your little Christmas day trip, which you know he’s not going to give a shit about. He’s getting worse, Angie.”

She deflects the negativity with a tight smile, slipping her arm through mine as we walk. “Familiar places are good for his memory.” She lowers her tone a few notches when we pass her supervisor and the receptionist, “He needs to get out of this place now and then. Otherwise he’s just going to get more and more confused.”

“He’s already confused.” The same question, over and over again. Where’s Alex? Where’s Alex? Where the fuck is Alex? Even the inflection is the same. Telling him his favourite son is dead was hard enough the first time; by the fiftieth the words don’t even make sense. I shake my head. “He doesn’t know who you are any more, does he?”

She jerks her arm like I’ve burned her. “Sometimes he does,” she says, “Sometimes he thinks I’m Alma.”

“Who’s Alma?”

“His Greek dentist.”

“He never had a Greek dentist.”

“In his head he did.”

“Have you seen his teeth? He never went to the fucking dentist.”

“Language, Matthew,” Angela stage whispers.

An old lady with toothpaste stains down the front of her cardigan glares at me and purses thin lips into a wrinkled cat’s arse. I smile back charmingly and she spits something yellow into a tissue. Bile rushes up my throat.

Angela pushes me towards the door with a long sigh, brushing down her uniform and turning back to face the legions of withering, floundering patients who snarl and snap and dribble and shit themselves and call her a bitch and a prostitute and try to pinch her arse and weep silently as they clutch at her hands, because they have no idea where they are any more. Angela is beyond human, beyond the zombies. And in amongst the daily miracles she performs, she still manages to smile and love the man who raised her like a daughter but for some reason now thinks she’s here to give him a root canal.

She pauses at the door and attempts a nonchalant expression, “Is Clare okay?”

My middle name should be ‘uncomfortable mediator’. No-one’s talking to Angela, not Dad, not even her own daughter. Clare, my niece, has been sleeping at my flat since Alex died. “I don’t know,” I say, “I mean, yeah, she’s fine.” I press my fingertips into the hollows under my eyes. Tiredness beyond talking. Too many faces that can’t seem to smile any more. And they’re all looking to me. “I’ve been trying to get her to call you, I promise.”

A slow, stoic nod from Angie and she turns away, waving once over her shoulder as the double doors swing shut behind her.

Across the car park I see Dad’s empty armchair through his bedroom window on the ground floor. One more week until the next weighing of my heart. The same chair, the same sagged face, uneven with stubble. Since his last stroke, one jowl hangs a few millimetres lower than the other, one eye sits deeper inside its discoloured hood. Another week closer to losing the answers he’s always refused to give me. Because I’m not just here for Angela, for whatever I owe Alex. I’m here because I don’t want him to die without telling me the truth: what really happened to my mother.

Chapter Two

My mind does not simply play tricks on me, it tucks me into bed, sneaks out on tiptoes and runs naked through the streets while I sleep soundly, unaware of the damage it causes and the horrors it commits and the humiliations it leaves laid out neatly for me when I awake.

It’s becoming harder to distinguish the spaces in between. My bed has been made but I don’t remember lying in it. The only hint that I did not pass a silent night is the splintering ache in my limbs, the heaviness of my joints, a flaring of pain behind my eyes with each pulse of my over-stimulated heart.

The nurses describe my nightly exploits in the same tone Ingrid next door talks about the latest soap storyline: lip-lickingly plump little portions of can-you-believe-its, wrapped in quasi-professional restraint. Last night they found me hysterically sorting socks, searching for something in my top drawer that clearly wasn’t there. And I woke wondering if there would be croissants for breakfast.

They say it’s a benign symptom, harmless to the one who experiences it, but it’s not. The not-knowing is like chloroform, stuffed into my nostrils, shoved deep down into my lungs - like a strap stretched tight across my sunken chest. The dread in knowing there will come a day when I blithely give away all the things that should never be known, without even noticing. My brain melts, my tongue loosens, and secrets could slip out of me as easily as sighs. The only way I know they haven’t already done so is the fact that my children are still speaking to me.

Matthew sits there, not three feet away from me, watching the clock until he’s spent his requisite hour and feels justified in leaving. He does it kindly, I suppose, or perhaps it’s contrived. He times his visits exactly an hour before lunch so that it will be one of the nurses who asks him to leave and not his own decision to go. He breathes through his mouth so he won’t have to smell the sweetness of the phlegm and decomposing flesh that permeates the very walls of this death camp. He’s given up trying to uphold a conversation with me, never knowing whether he will find a relevant response, a stammering idiot or a silent rebuttal. An hour of stifling quiet in between, “Anything you need, Dad?” and “Nurse says it’s time to go, Dad. I’ll see you next week.”

He must think I’m not speaking to him, but what is there left to say? You really don’t have to sit here and watch me disintegrate.

He looks tired. A petulant anger that must surely be directed at me. I worry about the hidden things when he’s here. I can’t concentrate. He’s saying something but I can’t decipher it. It’s hard enough trying to keep my eyes from fixing on what I don’t want him to find. The eyes in the shadows beneath the bed.

The room is too small and the walls lean in. A divan, a chair, drawers, a window, two doors. One leads to a bathroom that could fit inside a cupboard. The other leads into the leafy-carpeted corridor, to notice boards and dado rails twisted with tinsel, a multitude of comfortable chairs and staff rooms locked tight. Two doors, but not always a bathroom and a corridor. Those are just two possibilities within the labyrinth. Sometimes the doorways lead to my kitchen, my aunt’s greenhouse, the plumbing aisle of Warton’s building merchants’, the passenger seat of Lydia’s car, a clifftop.

The clifftop is the worst. There are fingernails on the edge, elongated footprints that slide from mud to sky, waves rising up to block out the sun. There is no way of returning from where you’ve been, but there is always another door. The only door on the clifftop is the telephone box and I can never bring myself to step inside.

The dementia is vascular, sniping at me with little strokes, a descending staircase, pushing me deeper within myself. Each one blunts another corner, cutting off the link between fingers and buttonholes, spoon and teacup, time and movement, nurse and step-daughter. I wonder if it will turn me inside out, eventually. The universe has become finite, composed entirely of doorways, shrinking ever smaller, closing down the open spaces. I move from door to door, from this gentle prison and weathered body to standing at a bay window, swaying a warm baby in my arms; to dragon-breath steam in a morning garden, turning potatoes out of the soil with a fork; to a dark, vanilla-scented bedroom, tracing Lydia’s waist with hot palms, back when I had two of them. Some days I look down to find my right hand sawn off with no recollection of the bite, the gangrene, the surgery.

I always return, though I don’t always know I’ve been away. And there is always another door.

I watch the doorway to the hallway now, keeping an eye on the predator, tensing for the pounce. It is waiting for Matthew to leave, urging me to slip through its wavering threshold.