White Lies (7 page)

“Let’s begin with
Wuji
,” says the Tai Chi instructor, an outrageously tall man with glasses so narrow they must be functionally useless. He talks about the breath and the flow, and we continue to stand or sit in varying degrees of hunchbacked apathy.

In the early days, we try to fill our time with minor interests: a film night or seminar, a book, a walk, a visit. Later, anything that breaks up the day becomes vaguely appealing, despite being otherwise intolerable: bible readings, Indian head massage, school choirs and recorder recitals. In the end, we go where we are told, because it is good for us, they say, because it will do us good.

“Tucking your tailbone under and floating the spine,” the instructor says. I cannot tell if anyone has changed their posture but someone farts and this is no longer a source of humour, but simply the sad punctuation of weakening sphincters.

Paul’s harmless small talk will eventually metastasise into the putrid growth of dissatisfaction - an endless griping and grousing about day-to-day pains and ailments. Irritation will begin to creep in whenever he mentions his previously beloved family, the nurses, the staff, the management, the government, the foreign, the young. His audience will listen but no-one will offer sympathy. A knowing, callous nodding will accompany the monologues instead, as though we are wound up in perpetual motion. Humility and tact will be tossed aside for frank discussions about bowel and bladder, prolapse and prostate.

“Relax the shoulders and sink the elbows.”

A woman at the back has fallen asleep in her chair. Another next to her is attempting to adopt the correct posture with a cup of tea in her hand. Something in my shoulder grinds and when I look down I see that my left arm is in a cast. I don’t know how it got there but the sweating skin itches underneath. The plaster taps against the buttons of my shirt with the trembling of my hand, stretching my arms forward in slow motion supplication just like the instructor does.

Once Paul is rid of his pride, next will come the pacing, the checking on others, the checking on whether it’s tea time, the checking of the minute personal details of the other residents, the nurses: “How did your Jack do in his driving test on Wednesday? Did you remember Ahmed’s laxative this morning? Make sure you wish Lorraine a happy birthday when you see her.” We sit because we cannot bring ourselves to move. We walk because we cannot bring ourselves to stop.

By the end, no-one speaks of their family; the darling grandkids are unimportant, milestones provoke only a passing flutter of acknowledgement. By the end, no-one bothers to mention the pain or the discomfort. Daylight and moonlight illuminate the same blank stare, the same shadowed face, the same absence of being.

And after that? I truly hope there’s nothing.

“Touch the tongue to the roof of the mouth and connect the meridian channels of Governing and Conception,” the instructor says, with an absolutely straight face. “Now integrate the whole body.”

I sidestep until I have left the room. Even listening to Paul is better than this. But when I reach our little end-of-the-line corridor I find his room empty. He must be leeching out the will to live from some other recipient of his latest thrilling piece of news. The man will not be dissuaded from telling me details of his family that I could not value any less if it were a list of out-of-date train times for a place I will never visit. He tells me about his daughter, Sharon, her partially deaf husband, Harry, their curly-haired brat, Franklin, their recent trip to the Isle of Man and, repeatedly, the time Franklin hilariously decided that he wanted to ride a cow. At no point have I led him to believe that I am interested in anything that comes out of his mouth, yet most afternoons he finds his way to my doorway and updates me on some pointless piece of information or other. A lost green sock. A magazine subscription. The chance of snow later in the week. I could spit in his face and he would no doubt launch into some amusing tale regarding the cuteness of his grandchild’s dribble. I hate him for reasons that have nothing to do with him. I hate him because I remember everything he tells me and yet my own memories have been flushed away.

My redundant brain has apparently decided that it is imperative for me to recall an inane collection of things which serve no purpose, while anything immediate and relevant slips inconspicuously out of my ears. I remember Eric Stafford at school telling me he’d once seen his mother plucking her pubic hair; the time I found a decapitated pigeon jammed up beneath the back bumper of my car; the phone number of Angela’s sleazy supervisor at the Bowlplex, the way he slung his arm around her when she arrived at work, the way he gave her shoulder a little squeeze and told her to hurry off and get into her uniform, and how I wanted to put his head in the ball polisher. I remember the recipe for fishcakes that I used to make for Lydia, the ones I never really liked and haven’t made since she died. I still remember Heather’s fourth-finger ring size.

The things I need to remember lie just out of reach, up in the top-right corner of my vision, driven to the edges of my consciousness by the useless drivel I can’t get rid of. If I sit perfectly still, the unwanted memories crowd in like radio babble. They keep me awake, jostling for attention, hoping to be the one that I choose, hoping they’ll be the one to cause an epiphany. It’s not really their fault; the problem’s in the processing. My brain can no longer distinguish between the relevance of being able to recite the third verse of
Away in a Manger
or knowing if it’s Tuesday or April. Walking helps, sometimes, coaxing an elusive memory down low enough for me to swing on. I should walk. I should try to find another doorway. I realise I am standing with none of the poise of Tai Chi in front of my other neighbour’s room and the woman inside it cranes forward in her bed to catch my eye.

“Hey, Mr Solemn!” Ingrid says.

I try to start walking again, but the synaptic orders fail at the first post and I remain helplessly frozen outside her open door.

“Come here, will ya?”

I stare straight ahead, waiting for my limbs to regain function. Hurry, she’s going to want to talk and -

“Do you need a bible?”

I shake my head.

“Do you need a packet of Turkish Delight?”

Chin left, chin right.

“Do you need… ” she pauses, glances down at her lap, “… an audio book box set of
The Lord of the Rings
on CD, read by Rob Ingles?”

I turn my head a few inches to the left. She’s smiling. “I don’t need any of this silly crap anymore,” she says. “Come here, Mr Solemn.”

My legs obey her voice. I’m rather surprised, and frankly quite annoyed with them.

She props herself up on an elbow and considers me as I shuffle-stop inside her doorway. “Well, you, you’re a scrawny little thing, aren’t you? If you’re not eating your puddings you can send them over to me.”

I roll my eyes. I’ve seen the nurses do it to her face and she doesn’t seem to notice.

“I know,” she says, “I’m ridiculous. Just ignore me like you usually do.”

I blush. I should be turning, leaving, but I cannot move.

She considers me for a moment. “Are you stuck?”

I nod.

“Right. Well. While you’re here, you might as well fill me in on your bits and bobs then. Normally I only get the snippets from the nurses and my sister, Yvonne. Not gossip, Mr Solemn, just the goings-on.”

My eyes plead for her to let me go but her expression is immovable.

“So, what did you do?” she asks, when it’s clear that I’m not about to offer up any information voluntarily.

I glance behind me at the empty corridor and take a subtle micro-step backwards towards it. The doorway is heating up like a jet engine. I can feel the hot air swirling, the particles getting excited, the lightning beginning to build. She’s waiting for an answer to a question I didn’t understand. I shrug.

“What did you do to get dumped here?” she says, within a single sigh. “You must have let something slip. Forgotten where you live or fed raw eggs to the cat? Something like that.”

It’s about this point I realise, by the rapidly filling catheter bag hanging from her bed, that while she is talking she is also casually urinating.

She fills the silence with: “Fine, I’ll go first. Well. I kissed my own brother.”

The catheter tube sways gently and bounces off the bedside.

“By that I mean
kissed
him, kissed on the lips. Like a lover.”

I nod, then stop. I can hear her mouth moistly twisting in a grin but I can’t take my eyes off the yellowing tube.

“So they tell me, anyway. I didn’t know who he was, or at least, I knew that I knew him, and I knew that I loved him, very much, so I assumed he was my husband. He’d come to meet me and my daughter for a pub lunch at the Harvester, and when he walked in I took him by the face and kissed him. I might have squeezed his bum a bit too. He’s quite handsome, even at his age.”

She stops pissing and the tube stills and drains. I look up at her. She’s laughing but she doesn’t seem to find it all that amusing.

“My husband died eighteen years ago, if you can believe it. How could I forget something like that?”

I try to ask her a question but it flails out of me in a grunt, instead. Since the last stroke, it’s been harder to push the words forward. By the time I get around to getting them in the right order the conversation has usually moved on. The doorway is almost ready, has almost reached terminal velocity. It vibrates around me now, so violently, so loudly that I can’t believe Ingrid hasn’t noticed, can’t believe that there aren’t paint chips and splinters flying across the room.

“They didn’t see the funny side, let’s put it that way,” she says. “But you should have seen his face.” She laughs in a lazy way: Ahah, ahah. Ha. “So, what about you?”

I want to answer her but I don’t know what I did to deserve this place. It’s bizarre to be told you can no longer look after yourself, like living with someone you never see; an annoying and intrusive character who leaves his shoes in the fridge. It reminded me of living with Heather, a compulsive but distracted tidier who would abandon small objects halfway through putting them away, having spotted something else that needed sorting. My watch would end up in the pestle and mortar, her cheque book in the fruit bowl, loose change in the craters of half-burned candles.

Before the doctors confirmed that my brain was shrivelling like a forgotten apple core, whenever things in the flat became misplaced, I wanted to blame Heather out of habit, even though she was thirty-odd years gone. She might well be invisible now, creeping in to sneak away with my glasses and the can opener.

Ingrid is still talking but the warmth of the doorway has reached my skin - the panicked flush of taking a wrong turn, missing a step, realising that you are about to drive onto the wrong side of the motorway. I know this feeling. It means I am reeling in a lost memory, albeit consciously out of reach. My body reacts to the recollection, but my mind isn’t in on the joke. I wonder what it is. It feels like a nasty one. I don’t really want to know, but I step backwards through the doorway anyway.

#

My foot lands on the cream kitchen tile of the house my children grew up in. Baked beans quiver in a pan on the hob, at the cusp of boiling. It was winter in the nursing home but here I stand in a short-sleeved shirt, irritable about cooking in the heat. Two plastic plates sit on the worktop: plain blue for Angela and Peter Rabbit in watery pastels for Matthew. My focus fixes on the miniature carrots and cabbages dotted around the rim. Not that Matthew ever ate his vegetables. He will be sitting next door, cross-legged, six inches away from the telly. Angela with him, in the armchair, in a book. The space above my diaphragm becomes a weightless vacuum of anticipation. I will bring them their tea and they will be four and ten again, and they will not know I have travelled here from so far.

The toaster pops. I butter the warm white slices and pour on the beans. Steam dampens my face and I know – even before I hear the clang of the plumbing in the bathroom above, even before the knocking begins – that this is the night that Alex is born.

Alex came early, which I suppose in a way Lydia must have been grateful for. All the panic and fuss meant her mathematical skills were never called into question. It wasn’t a case of her thinking I was stupid, I’m fairly sure. It was more that she didn’t want to push the ease of my acceptance. She chose me. She stayed. She loved her baby boy. Three ticks in a ledger against her name. I worried I wouldn’t want him when he arrived but then there he was and it was like a childhood Christmas and people visited and brought casseroles and knitted little cardigans and sent cards of congratulations instead of condolences. Lydia and Alex were living, present, irrefutable proof that I was not completely abhorrent.

It’s a Wednesday. Lydia and I had argued in the afternoon about the fact that she hadn’t locked the car. Someone had stolen the stereo and my driving glasses but she maintained somehow that it wasn’t really her fault because pregnancy makes you scatter-brained and she didn’t know
why on earth
I was getting so worked up about bloody driving glasses and anyway, we had insurance. And my throat closed up around the responses I wouldn’t say to her: “for God’s sake” and “how hard is it to remember to lock a door?” and “what if it had been the front door you’d left open?” and “why don’t these things bother you in the same way they bother me?”

So she said she was going to have a bath and I put on Matthew and Angela’s tea. Ten minutes later she’d knocked a panicked rhythm on the floor and I went up to find her sitting in a red bath with a white face.

All they seemed to do at the hospital was check his heartbeat, over and over, never telling us if it was good or bad or non-existent. I left the room while they examined her and the next thing I knew she was being wheeled past me at high speed on her way to the operating theatre.

Alex was pulled backwards out of the hole in her stomach at ten to eight that evening. Grey, squirming, and smaller than a loaf of bread. Lydia wouldn’t stop smiling, even when they took him to the special care unit and told us he might be brain damaged from the lack of oxygen.