White Lies (6 page)

I’ve been sleeping on the sofa since Sabine left me. Frost edges itself through the gap under the living room window and crawls across the inside of the pane. The sun goes down before the day is really over and the birds screech because they think it is the end of the world.

Actually, I don’t know if that’s true.

It’s something Alex told me, so there’s a good chance it’s a lie. When the sun goes down, the birds think that’s the end of it, he said - the end of the world. So they sit there, silent, terrified, coming to terms with an imminent eternity in nothingness, eventually falling asleep out of pure exhaustion. And that’s exactly how I get to sleep now he’s dead - a cocktail of terror and guilt rising up until my brain has to reboot, just as those first rosy tendrils come creeping over the horizon like a sick fucking joke. Dawn’s fingers are not gentle, they’re clawed, scraping away at my eyelids like a drawn-out headache, a balloon skin stretched tight, about to snap.

And just like the rest of the nights since Alex died I will still be awake when the sun shows its face again. The birds though, well, they rejoice, go fucking mental, like hollow-eyed refugees in a bunker hearing the shelling stop. “It’s over, we’re alive, there’s a tomorrow!” Well, the birds can fuck themselves because I don’t know how much longer I can do any of this without sleep.

After he died, after the first week of coasting on the sheer what-the-fuckery of it all, Sabine made the break. My girlfriend of four years peered at the broken purple lines that surrounded my sunken eyes and said, “I love you,” as if it was my fault. Then she left, like they all do: mother, step-mother, brother. The only one I can’t get rid of is Dad, like a scab I can’t stop picking.

Sabine said that I had enough to deal with at the moment and I didn’t need to have to deal with her – with us – on top of that. What she meant, I think, was that she had given up waiting for me to act like a human being and grieve for my dead brother. He was the catalyst, giving her one final opportunity to see if it was worth putting any effort into redeeming me. To see if a little chink of humanity might peek through my flabby exterior. She was disappointed. She left.

It’s something past one in the morning. Three floors below my flat a little scrappy dog has been shut out on a balcony and it barks like a cheap hacksaw stuck in a piece of metal, jarring back and forth, twice at a time, one, two, one, two. The TV is muted but the light waves flicker through the dusty air into the kitchen and turn the fridge blue, yellow, green - a flash of red in an action movie explosion then dark again. This is my routine: waiting for two a.m. to come and go.

Next door’s phone rings. A call like that means tragic news or a drunken misdial. My bald neighbour and I share the uninsulated wall between his bedroom and my living room. He knocks in the same two-by-two rhythm as the barking dog when my TV volume is too high and I glow quietly with shame, imagining the scathing judgement of my programme choices. I don’t knock when I overhear him masturbating to his own shitty band’s EP, but I allow myself to thumb the volume button on the remote a few notches higher. Through the wall I hear a slammed receiver and muttered swearing. Just a wrong number. Carl or Greg or whatever his name is will turn over and go back to sleep.

On my birthday I had the other kind of phone call, the middle-of-the-night call that has replaced the solemn policeman on the doorstep, his hat in his hands. Instead of a policeman I got Jamie, Alex’s best and most irritating friend, the little weasel-bastard-moron who has plagued my life almost as much as my brother did. My call came at two-twenty-two a.m. Three little twos all in a row, red digits blossoming into the darkness. A wavering line of ducks waiting to be shot down. “You don’t see that every day,” I’d observed to Sabine, and laughed to myself for being so witty at such short notice as I rolled over to pick up the phone.

“Al’s dead.”

Before I’d even said hello.

“Hello?”

“Al’s dead. Matt? Are you there?”

“Fuck off, Jamie.”

“Did you hear me? Your brother - ”

This was no time to be flippant but it was two-twenty-two in the morning and our usual conversation consisted of jokes about my personal appearance and sadistic wind-ups. “
Half
-brother,” I said.

He was silent for too long. An echo that didn’t exist began to zigzag around the inside of my skull, words that didn’t belong together fused into misshapen lumps - little spasms of reality waiting to be acknowledged. “Okay,” he said quietly, “your half-brother is dead. Happy?” And then he hung up.

#

The night of my birthday, after Sabine and I had returned to my flat, still hungry after our half-finished meal, she shut herself in the bedroom and pretended she had a migraine.

I made a bowl of instant noodles just to piss her off. She thinks they smell like dog food – and they do – but then again they are also an excellent passive-aggressive tactic. I wanted her to come stomping out to shout at me. I wanted to argue. It would have been better than the quiet indifference she pummelled me with, until she finally snapped, stole half my DVD collection and fucked off to some rich uni-mate’s second home in Greenwich.

I could sleep back then. A few repeat episodes of a crappy ‘90s sitcom combined with the couple of extra stones I was carrying around and I was content to commit to a symbiotic relationship with the sofa. I had no qualms about sleeping in the living room, if only to prompt a “Why didn’t you come to bed last night?” discussion with Sabine in the morning. At least there was sleep. There was no hole in the wall, then.

But there was a noise like a wall falling down.

“Matt! Let me in, you fuckhead!”

My adrenaline spike died away but the hammering on the front door didn’t stop.

“Who the hell is that?” Sabine yelled from the bedroom.

My fear subsided into dread. “Alex.”

Against screaming better judgement, I opened the door to a clout of winter air and the face of something far worse. “Matty.”

“You’re drunk.”

“You’re ugly. Oh, hello little one!” Alex leered around the door to wave at Sabine, who had appeared behind me in a t-shirt and a pair of my boxer shorts. He smiled at her in a way that made me want to slam the door shut on his head, but instead I let him hang off my shoulder as he leaned too far forward to keep his balance. Behind him stood Jamie, considerably more sober but no less unwelcome. “You alright?” Alex asked, making it very clear that he didn’t care if I was.

“Are you?” Sabine said.

“No, I’m fucking not.” He aimed an index finger in the vicinity of my face. “Get me a drink.” I fought an urge to let him drop to the floor, propped him up against the wall, and went to put the kettle on.

“A drink, you moron, not a cup of fucking tea!” he said.

“We don’t have anything. It’s juice or tea.”

“There’s vodka on top of the cupboard,” Sabine said, and I glowered at her, miming for her to put on a fucking dressing gown or something that would stop my brother’s eyes from blinking slowly at her figure.

“Vodka. Yeah, great idea,” I said. Alex let out a low giggle and weaved his way into the living room, sliding onto the sofa sideways and draping an arm across his face. I made him a vodka and orange with not much vodka in it, and hoped he wouldn’t stay for a second one. Sabine and Jamie stood at either end of the sofa, mirroring each other: arms crossed, eyes on my brother.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I told you I was coming. Happy birthday.”

“Yeah. Thanks. Couldn’t make it to the meal? I can see you’ve been really busy.”

“I need your car.”

And there it was, the real reason. “No,” I said.

“Okay, I need you to drive me somewhere.”

“No.”

“Don’t you even want to know where?”

I sighed, in the most impatiently-condescending-older-brother way I could muster. “Where?”

Alex squinted meaningfully. “Dad.”

“It’s what, half eleven? They’re not going to let you visit now.”

“Fuck you, I’ve got
the letter!
” He brandished a crumpled piece of paper to prove his unexplained point.

“Right, well, get a taxi. Good luck, good night - ” I made a futile gesture towards the door but Alex climbed onto the back of the sofa like a Neanderthal man staking a claim on higher ground, holding the letter out of reach even though no-one was trying to take it from him. Sabine winced as orange juice sluiced across the cushions.

“Alex, go home,” I said.

He shook his head so hard I expected his eyeballs to roll from side to side. “The old solici-fucking-tor died…” he said.

“Who?”

“My mum gave him the letter, for me, for eighteen - for when I was eighteen. To read. But then he died.”

“What?”

The red eyes that I had first dismissed as abused, drunken blood vessels now looked more like they were swollen from crying. Really? Alex, crying? “A letter from your mum?” I repeated, “Why wasn’t it with the will?”

“Exactly! It was sep-at-ated… Sepit-Separate. Just for me. But the solici-fucker went and died and it got filed and his daughter took over the firm and… ” He took a slug of his drink and had to sit down. “And… forgotten about. For thirteen years.”

Sabine said, “Oh my God.”

Alex pointed his glass at her earnestly. “Yes.”

“So, what does it say?” I asked, nodding to the scrunched up paper, wondering how much of the shaking of Alex’s hands could be attributed to drink, and how much to the letter.

“
Wait
for it, Matty. I’m not there yet. The only reason they found it at all was ‘cause they moved office and were re-filing or some… ing. Bastards!”

He was getting louder. I flinched and apologised to my neighbour under my breath.

“Alex, what does the letter say?” Sabine asked softly, and Alex smoothed out the paper on his knees, took a breath as if to read, then screwed it up again.

“Dad,” he said, “is not,” he laughed, “my dad.”

#

It was two-twenty-two in the morning. I threw Jamie’s phone call, and my phone with it, at the wall and woke up Sabine.

“What’s the matter with you?” she whined in a high-pitched whisper and I wanted to throttle her.

“Give me your phone.”

“Not if you’re going to throw it at the wall.”

“Please, Bina.”

She heaved one arm out of bed and groped on the floor for the jeans she had been wearing the day before in an exaggerated display of outraged inconvenience. I leant over her, crushing her legs, swiping the trousers out of her hands. “For fuck’s sake, I’ll get it.”

I fished out the phone and stabbed a finger at Alex’s name. “The number you are calling is currently unavailable,” an automated voice told me.

I lurched out of bed and crouched cold and naked in the centre of my room as though that might somehow make a difference. I redialled the number Jamie had called from. A beep after each ring meant a payphone. No answer. I tried again.

“What’re you doing?” Sabine asked, just as someone picked up. I shushed her with a hand in her face. She grunted and rolled over, pulling the covers over her head.

“Hello? Hello? Jamie?”

“No,” said a female voice. “This is the Hannigan ward.”

Shit. Oh my God. “
Hospital
ward?” I asked, like a remedial echo.

“Yes. Who are you trying to reach?”

“Someone just - his name’s Jamie. I mean, I’m trying to get hold of Alex, my brother, my half-brother. Shit.”

“Look, you need to call the hospital switchboard, this is just a payphone. Sorry.”

“Okay. Thanks. Sorry. Thank you. Bye.”

Sabine’s muffled voice drawled through the duvet, “What’s he done now?”

The hand holding the phone was cold. I couldn’t seem to blink. My mouth went dry then flooded with saliva. I swallowed. It hurt. “He died.”

Chapter Six

I saw my dentist, Alma, again today. I think she might be following me.

She gave me some painkillers and said she’d be back later. I can’t remember what dental work I have scheduled, if any. I have a suspicion that she isn’t a dentist at all - her fingers aren’t slender enough. They lack the precision of a skilled practitioner and fumble over pouring the tablets from their child-locked pot. Needless to say I smiled compliantly and hid the tablets in the shoebox under my bed when she had gone.

I agreed to take a Tai Chi class this afternoon, in the low-ceilinged, green-carpeted dining hall that smells of chips and disappointment, just so I could escape the conversational efforts of Paul, the idiot in the room next to Whistler’s. Paul is deep in the throes of stage one - the first step to acceptance that there will be no escape from this place but the inevitable exit route.

It is painfully clear who is new here. In a fluster of shock and denial at suddenly finding themselves in care, they talk constantly about their children, their grandchildren, anyone who is still living their life on the outside: the births, the marriages, the divorces, the moves, the holidays to the Algarve, the GCSEs, A Levels, degrees, the new kitten, the new car, the new Xbox. No-one actively listens to these anecdotes, they simply serve as background noise while we are quietly assimilated into institution.