White Lies (26 page)

Sarah mutters “oh shit” over and over in an endless stream of ineffectual anxiety.

The policewoman’s eyes give away a moment of uncertainty before her training surges to the surface with indignant embarrassment. Her knee shoots up into my nuts and she shoves me sideways, reversing our positions and kneeling on my chest, grinding my wrists into gravel as she holds my arms down.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the policewoman barks, a blush sweeping from the bridge of her nose to the tips of her ears.

“Arrest me, please,” I say. I had hoped it would have sounded more forceful than it did. I probably should have left off the ‘please’.

She wasn’t expecting that. “Why? What have you done, besides trespassing and being an idiot?”

“For murder,” I say. “Or manslaughter at least.”

She doesn’t move but her fingers dig into my forearms. “Are you serious?”

I nod. We are speaking too quietly for Sarah to hear, even with her face pressed against the fence.

The policewoman shifts on my chest, knees pushing a little closer to my throat. “If you want me to arrest you, then you’re going to cooperate when I let you up, alright? You’re going to walk nicely with me into the station so I can ask you some questions. Right?”

“I promise.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Let’s go then.”

Sarah starts shouting after us but I don’t bother to look back.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I listen to the gentle breathing that drifts down the phone line for several minutes before I realise it is my own.

“Hello?”

There are cracks in my voice that weren’t there a few years ago, a few months ago. I am pleading but nobody’s listening.

“No answer?” the receptionist asks, taking the receiver out of my hands.

She had to dial Matthew’s number for me because I couldn’t work out the keypad, even though of course I know how to use a bloody goddamned stupid phone. Except the numbers keep changing, and the tones make discordant music, and there was someone down the line talking to me but it wasn’t my son. Or not the right one. I can’t remember which one I was trying to call.

I need to talk to Alex. The doorways have gone quiet. My voice is back, temporarily. The pressure in my head clamps tighter, squeezing me out of existence. I need to talk to Matthew. There’s something I need to tell him. Something I need to ask. Something about Alex.

I push myself away from the receptionist desk - a badly orchestrated series of manoeuvres that results in a tottering stumble into the opposite wall. She moves to help but I growl at her, causing the bloodhounds at her feet to raise their heads.

“Where’s Angela?” I demand.

The receptionist tilts her face away and flares her nostrils as if she is a posturing bird. “You saw her this morning, Peter.”

“I know I did. Where is she now?”

She smiles slowly and returns to her all-knowing book of schedules, shift patterns and emergency contact numbers. “Angelaaaah,” she drawls, licking a finger and flicking over a page. “She’ll be pretty busy with dinner until six-thirty, Peter,” she explains with fake regret. “And then she’ll be going home. I can page her if you waaaant… ” Her whining vowels imply that I would be incomprehensibly selfish to insist on such a thing. Not that I want to bother her anyway. I don’t want to see her cry again.

“Matthew?” I ask.

She sighs and that’s always a bad sign. “Peter. He’s been and gone.”

I want my son. I can’t wait until next week. I try to nod, clench back tears. “Yes, of course.”

“I can call him again for you if you like.”

“No, no.” Then, quietly, tentatively: “Alex?” It’s worth a try.

Her eyes squint with pity. “I’m sorry, Peter.”

Back to my room then. Perhaps Matthew will be waiting there. Maybe he’s been there all along, wondering where I’ve got to.

“Ah, finally!” The receptionist exclaims, rolling her eyes at something behind me through the double doors that are ever so slightly too heavy for the average old person to push their way through without assistance; a clever security measure disguised as an open invitation to leave at any time. The country roads stretch for miles in every direction with no bus service and no pavements. A mid-Sussex Gulag. Nowhere to run, not that any of us can run any more.

A hearse pulls into the car park and two funeral directors unhurriedly climb out. I shuffle faster. I don’t want to witness their jovial exchange with the receptionist. I don’t want them to eye me over, nodding politely, marking me down as an inevitable client - visions of death in satin-lined jackets.

I tense for verbal abuse as I pass Ingrid’s half-closed door, for a screeching “Hey, Mr Solemn!” but there is nothing. Not even a cough. I push her door fully open and my guts make origami folds inside me. Her bed is fully reclined. Her face is grey and still. The rasping white noise that has served as her breathing for the last few weeks is oddly absent. My throat contracts behind my Adam’s apple, unsure whether I am trying to swallow, take in breath, or make noise. A singular low note of meditation escapes it.

Yesterday’s crossword lies on her bedside table, annotated and smudged by unsteady fingers. Her hands have clawed themselves into fists. Her drip no longer drips, has been disconnected from her cannula, tubes and leads neatly coiled and hung from the hook. Her catheter is gone, her sheets smoothed around her body, tucked in tight. Night night, Ingrid, sleep well, sleep long, forever.

I drop into a slow, creaky crouch, like an elderly frog, holding onto the edge of her bed for fear of drowning. The sheets are cold. She was not a small woman but her body appears to have shrunk, devoid of its spirit, its brashness. The only sound in the room is the ticking of wood panelled walls, tortured by central heating.

“Excuse me, Sir.” A warm hand clamps under my armpit. One of the funeral directors gets down on one knee next to me. “Need a hand getting up?”

I do, but I don’t want one. He pulls me to my feet anyway.

“What are you doing in here?” The receptionist barks shrilly, like her bloodhounds.

“When did she go?” I ask.

“This morning,” she says, with only a little softening of her voice.

There’s nothing really more to say. I shake my arm to dislodge the grip of the funeral director who peers into my face to see if there are tears. I smile and turn, swiping the audio book box set of
The Lord of the Rings
from her dresser on my way.

#

I burst through the swinging kitchen doors like a cowboy into a saloon, though with considerably less balance. The staff startle but no-one steps forward to take the responsibility of removing me. A tall porter with bad skin grimaces and hurries towards the side door when I catch his eye. “Alex!” I call after him, following at my own pace, knocking aside the halfhearted attempts to stop me.

There is moisture in the air outside that promises rain within the next half an hour but I have nowhere to go, no appointments to keep, no plans to be ruined by the weather. Alex waits, defeated, by the back wall. I thrust the box set into his hands.

“What’s this?” he says.

“For you. Payment. I need some more.”

The boy stares incredulously. “They confiscated it, mate. They thought one of your kids brought it in. Thank fuck. Look. You can’t talk to me anymore, I don’t want to get fired for this.”

My kids. My baby boy. Alex tries to pass the box back to me but I hold his hands still. “Why don’t you visit me?”

He pauses. “I don’t know you, mate. Sorry.”

Confusion feels like drunkenness. He’s right but I can’t work out how. “You… But you visited Ingrid.”

“Not really. It’s just a bit of weed.”

“She died,” I say, and still the tears don’t come.

He falters. “Sorry,” the boy says. “She was cool.”

“She was.”

Cool like Lydia. Women who said exactly what was on their minds, regardless of who they were speaking to; who frightened me as much as they amused me. Women who died as if they’d been turned inside out, turned into a reversal of their living selves: weak and terrified and uncertain. Unwomaned. Terrordied.

My last conversation with Ingrid had been painful and sporadic:

“I should have had children,” she’d said. “Some nice, clean girls. No, maybe not girls. Boys have that mumsy attachment that make them feel guilty enough to look after you to the bitter end. Haven’t you seen? The men visit more than the women. Don’t roll their eyes quite so much. You’re lucky you’ve got boys.”

I sat at her bedside, knuckling pins and needles out of my legs.

“Oh I’ve got friends, but who wants to come all the way out here? No bus, too expensive for a taxi. I don’t blame them.”

I folded my legs under the chair, folded my hands in my lap, folded my lips into well-worn grooves and listened to her choke on her own breath. “Your sister?”

“Yvonne? She’d be too busy, I think. She’s got one of those posh phones now - does everything. Has all her appointments in it and a camera and a radio. But she’ll be busy. I don’t want to bother her. Had enough of those calls myself, pain in the bloody arse. I don’t want to be a boil on the arse of life, if that’s the last thing I can be.”

There were tears in her voice, and fear, even though her eyes stayed fierce. “Nope. I’ll leave all that crap to the home. I hope I shit myself while they’re cleaning me up. Dead bodies do that, you know. All our sins come out in the end, the body lets it all go, relaxes for once. You know, being so uptight makes you hold it all in, Peter, you should think about that, think about not being so constipated all the time. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, Ingrid.”

“Have a good old poo.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t let them dress me like a trussed up turkey with my hair all curled, covered in lipstick, will you? I don’t want to look like one of those drag women. Men. You know. No-one would recognise me.”

“I’ll try.”

“Are you coming to the funeral? Please do, I’d love you to be there, if they let you out. Get your girl to take you. Your little Angela. Sweet girl.”

I nodded slowly.

“I’d feel better if you were there. I won’t be so nervous. Nerve-wracking, lying up there in front of all those people, talking about me, looking at me, feeling sorry for me.”

I won’t be there
, I knew, silently.

“They wouldn’t even let me mow my own bloody lawn, Peter! Next door’s Freya nagged and nagged that her husband could do it. Well, I said, he
could
do it, I said, but I know the contours of the ground… ”

#

The wind throws spatters of rain into my face, stinging my eyes, which still refuse to cry for my only friend. A young man stands beside me, smoking, and he looks something like Alex.

“Where is he?” I ask, but he doesn’t know. “Where’s Alex?” I ask, but he doesn’t know who I mean.

I look for something that will hurt. The brittle bones of my fist click when they make contact with my temple. I shake my head and try again, the other arm this time, battering my stump against my forehead. I pull at my remaining hair, ripping it out at the roots. Greasy tufts poke through the gaps in my fingers. I punch again at my crown, finding a rhythm, using the pointiest part of my knuckles to cause the most pain.

“Dude… ” the boy says. “Stop it. What are you doing?”

He grabs my forearms and holds them still. He is strong and I am old. I throw my head back against the pebble-dashed wall instead.

“Stop it! It’s okay,” he says, in a soft voice that is strangely reassuring. He gently releases my arms. “You want Alex?”

I nod vehemently. And now the crying begins.

“Come with me. He’s waiting in your room. Let’s go back to your room.”

He wraps an arm awkwardly around my shoulders and guides me out of the rain, into the stinking steam of the kitchen where they are cooking spaghetti for dinner.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Look, Sir,” the policewoman says, “I still don’t see how your brother’s death was your fault.”

Why is she calling me Sir? Her tired sarcasm is beginning to grate. I don’t know how else to tell it.