The Truth

by Naomi Joy

  ‘Are you sure you were properly checked over? Your dad can always arrange something with one of the specialists at the hospital.’ Mum looms closer and I spot the flecks of a lipstick she doesn’t usually wear clinging to her yellowing front teeth.

  My dad nods enthusiastically. ‘Anytime.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I reply, knowing I won’t take them up on the offer.

  ‘Shall we eat?’ Mum asks abruptly, forgetting all about the just boiled kettle. ‘You must both be hungry after your train and taxi and God knows what else.’

  ‘I don’t know how you live without a car,’ Dad chimes in. ‘A little city runner, something compact, that’s what you need.’

  We’ve travelled for ninety minutes. No wonder the nation’s in the grip of an obesity crisis if it’s acceptable to believe that walking from a train to a taxi is an appetite boosting ordeal.

  ‘Well, we don’t leave the city very often, and the trains work fine,’ I answer, shutting down the conversation.

  With that, they disappear, shaking their heads in unnerving synchronicity, to prepare lunch.

  This visit has been sprung upon me somewhat last minute and I’m trying to feel my way through it. I want to use it to my advantage, buy some time away from Anthony, take the opportunity to make my parents question his motives, but their off-key display is throwing me sideways and I can’t think straight.

  ‘They’re being so weird,’ I say to Anthony under my breath. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed, darling.’ He glides across the aggressively magnolia room – walls, curtains, sofas, dining chairs, cushions; almost everything’s been selected in the same off-peach colour – and peers into old photo frames, picking them up one by one, studying them as though family photographs are a new concept. He looks astonishingly out of place here – his debonair façade, almost professor-like thanks to his glasses and moustache, clash with the cheap tat surrounding him. The framed artwork over my parents’ mantel isn’t a striking Monet or an off-beat Picasso but an inspirational quote in loopy brown letters: A house is built with walls and beams. A home is built with love and dreams.

  ‘Really?’ I reply, moving after him. Though Anthony’s not my confidant, I am so unnerved by my parents’ display that I can’t help discussing this with him. ‘The matching outfits, the big smiles?’

  He raises his eyebrows and lifts his shoulders to his ears. ‘I don’t know. They seem fine to me.’

  I steal a glance into the kitchen, all white edges and straight chrome lines since Anthony paid to have it redone and watch as they playfight over who’s going to bring in which pre-prepared dish.

  My parents have always been good people – though there was a blip when I was a teenager where they were better described as neglectful – but they’ve never been weird. Growing up, things were steady and stable and I was a perfectly happy only child. I ruled these tarmacked streets outside my house on my mountain bike for ten whole years, until my mum fell pregnant again in her late forties. Unplanned, unexpected and unexplained. My parents had both gone through an emotional rollercoaster – shocked, then excited, then giddy – and I can vividly remember that time in our lives. What had previously been referred to as ‘Dad’s room’ – filled entirely with car models, car calendars and car posters – was now being turned into a nursery, a new cot arriving with white angels and doves carved into the wood, a mobile overhead with squishy animals that roared and squeaked and howled if you pressed their bellies. Our lives were up and over turned by the presence of a human who wasn’t even alive yet. I hadn’t felt jealous, I’d been thrilled at the idea of welcoming a new baby brother or sister into our family – I’d long hoped for it – and we were happy, in the run up, but then everything changed. As things so often do.

  I remember going to the hospital to meet the new baby. Stepping through those enormous doors, passing hundreds of people coughing and bleeding and dying – wheeled round the wards in enormous beds that looked like army tanks with high metal railings and beeping machines. It terrified me and I clung to my dad’s coat as we made our way to the maternity ward. When we got there, it was clear that there was something wrong. Everyone was rushing and running with raised voices, gesticulating wildly to one another. My dad had ripped my hand from his jacket and ran towards the chaos, leaving me behind. Neither of us had known it then but my sibling was already dead and the doctors and nurses were doing their best to save my mum. She was bleeding out on the operating table, unresponsive to the clotting drugs designed to stop this sort of thing from happening. My dad had left me alone in the waiting room where I couldn’t see much, but I remember the chairs were like big plastic buckets, high up, and my legs had swung free above the floor. I watched happy, scared and crying faces in the waiting room, was checked up on a few times by a nurse, and I spotted my dad at the end of the corridor occasionally, his face split with worry. Every time I glimpsed him through the window in the doors down to the main wing, I leapt from my seat, ready to meet the baby, but each time he disappeared into a new room and out of sight. Once, I saw his face fall into his hands and his shoulders shake and I knew then that something bad had happened.

  Later, my grandma picked me up and took me home. Together, we packed up the nursery and she explained to me that Mummy’s baby went to heaven instead of coming to us on earth. I accidentally hit the roaring lion when I was packing it away and I didn’t know why at the time but it made me cry. Perhaps I realised then that the baby was dead and that things weren’t ever going to be the same again. Grandma kept talking about angels and heaven and Jesus but I understood death, I wasn’t stupid, I’d seen it happen to Rhonda the guinea pig at school. I wasn’t eight years old, I was ten. I understood perfectly that death meant you either went to heaven or you went to hell and that, probably, for the amount of trouble they’d caused and for how upset they’d made Mummy and Daddy, that my dead baby brother or sister was going straight to hell.

  The baby, I learned later, died during the caesarean, and would have been profoundly disabled. My parents had been advised of this earlier in the pregnancy and there’d always been a chance that there would be a miscarriage, though there never was. My parents never gave up on their second child, their miracle, their beautiful surprise.

  In the years that followed, my dad retrained as a nurse – he waved goodbye to his job at the garage. The impeccable care that my mum and he received pushed him to give something back. They re-mortgaged the house so they could afford it.

  I outgrew that mountain bike quickly, but I was still riding on it when I was twelve, much to the delight of the kids on the estate who could rib me for ‘riding a baby’s bike’ and, though a new one was all I asked for every year, my parents could never afford it.

  It was at that time my dad ignited my ‘passion’ for ‘history’ by buying me an amateur archaeology book for Christmas instead. We’d gone out digging together and found, well, mostly junk, but a few old coins and a shiny sixpence were all it took to ignite a lifelong obsession with the past. We grew closer and, sometimes, I’d go to see my dad at work, I’d walk down to the hospital – a stone’s throw from our house – early in the morning, just as Dad was finishing the night shift and, after his day was done, he’d drive me to school to start mine. It was just about the only time we saw each other. Occasionally, I’d sneak into the cool, dark rooms – the empty ones – and run my hands over the equipment, plucking scissors and bandages from plastic trays. Inspect IV lines and drips and wires. I’d lie in the beds and wonder how it would feel to lie in one for real. It was exhilarating, being in a hospital. Little did I know at the time how well acquainted I was going to get with them myself when I was eighteen, traipsing in and out of ward room after ward room, lonely, trying to come to terms with a life altering cardiac condition without the support of my family, still grieving the loss of their other child.

  In fact, my mum has never fully recovered. She went to the trashy women’s magazines she loved to read with her story to tr
y and cleanse herself of it, I guess. Perhaps she told herself she wanted ‘good’ to come of the experience, and pictures of her in the delivery room with thick red veins in her eyes appeared all over our house. After that, she refused to speak about it ever again and, to this day, she’ll switch the channel on the TV if a pregnant woman flashes up. It’s still too painful for her. If I were feeling cruel, I’d say that she secretly loves the attention. She had the strength to talk about it to strangers who twisted her words and printed headlines like ‘HORROR’ BABY WITH ‘ALIEN DNA’ NEARLY KILLED ME but she would fan her dry eyes as though they were bristling with tears if anyone else wanted to discuss it. All the while my dad would stand by her side, arm round her thickening waist, indulging and encouraging her behaviour, wiping her dry cheeks with a white handkerchief. I am arrested, for a moment, by the thought that he and Anthony are not entirely dissimilar.

  *

  We sit to a table of lunchmeat, a pitiful attempt at a salad, and an array of shop bought bread. Mum offers me a glass of supermarket wine and, when I refuse, her face contorts into the grief-stricken expression I knew so well growing up. This is my real mum, not the Stepford Wife who opened the door.

  ‘You’re not…?’ she asks, barely audible, unable to bring herself to say the word.

  ‘No, Mum, I’m not,’ I reply, wondering, for a moment, what would happen if I ever did decide to have a baby. I’m sure it would rip our family apart all over again. My parents would both put pressure on me not to go through with the birth because of my heart condition, Dad would make me talk to doctors who shared his view and he’d say things like, If you die having this child, we’ll be the ones who’ll have to raise it. Remember that, Emelia! This decision doesn’t just affect you.

  Mum would cry. All the time. She’d refuse to see me, she’d refuse to let Dad see me, she’d refuse to see the baby until it was all grown up and even then she’d want nothing to do with it.

  Perhaps it is for the best I do not intend to have a child.

  In the end, no one accepts her offer of alcohol and we all virtuously tuck into blackcurrant squash instead, smacking our lips at how tasty it is.

  ‘Better than wine, I think,’ my dad exclaims. ‘And far healthier… pregnant or not!’ he jokes.

  Anthony and I laugh politely and Mum winces from her seat, her right hand theatrically gripping her abdomen at the passing reference to the word pregnant.

  ‘How’s work?’ I ask Dad, keen to change the subject.

  ‘Oh, you know, politics here, nursing council there, underpaid and overworked and short-staffed with no plan for the future.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  He rolls his eyes, pokes his fork into a roll of ham. ‘We’ll be OK. I’m retiring soon. Take the pension and get out.’

  The whiskers on his cheeks ruffle as he laughs. The realities of the nursing industry somewhat took the gleam off my father’s virtuous career change and I sometimes wonder if what actually happened was a redundancy package at the garage and, because he’d been spending so much time with nurses and he lacked imagination, that’s what he decided to do afterwards.

  I nod, waiting for him to ask something about my life, but nothing comes back my way and an unsettling silence descends. My parents often comment that, since doing well at school, getting a job as a journalist and moving to London, I am ‘too good’ for them. I think they feel a bit uncomfortable asking me about my work in case they don’t understand it.

  Knives scrape plates. Mouths chew food. Eyes dart left and right.

  ‘We still adore the kitchen, Anthony. We’re in there all the time, aren’t we?’ my father gushes.

  ‘We are, it’s like out of the pages of one of my magazines,’ Mum adds, pointing to the sad stack of wrinkled weeklies piled high in the corner of the lounge, garish colours dulled over time. The ones previously in the kitchen have moved in here, too.

  Anthony bats them away. ‘Don’t mention it, it was the least I could do.’

  My parents have thanked Anthony for the kitchen about a billion times, so I know we’re in trouble when they’re relying on that again for a source of conversation.

  I pull a soggy, brown clump of something from the salad, inspect it, then pick my way to the healthier looking leaves as the air stills once more. I arrange them neatly on my plate then turn my attention to the rest of the spread, eventually settling on an off-white clump of turkey, a sliver of smoked salmon, and a flaccid slice of white bread. I wish they’d just done a big pot of baked beans and endless rounds of toast, like they normally would, but I guess they’re trying to impress.

  The chime of an old wind-up clock breaks the deadlock for a moment, ticking us loudly into a new hour, but the hiatus is brief and all too soon the silence resumes.

  ‘Lovely salmon,’ Anthony offers through the quiet – they’ll be pleased he approves; this was all for him – and they both burst into mumbled agreements.

  ‘Alaskan,’ my mum adds, as if she caught it this morning in fisherman’s overalls and a sweetcorn-yellow sou’wester hat, rather than the supermarket’s bargain bucket.

  But the interlude is brief and all too soon the quiet resumes.

  ‘Could you pass the pepper?’ I ask and watch as Mum practically launches out of her chair to retrieve it for me, glad of something to do to break the atmosphere.

  ‘Thanks…’ I say, slowly, to put across how uncomfortable I feel.

  Dad coughs gently, as if he’s about to speak, and we all look at him but he doesn’t and the table wide stand-off persists.

  I can’t for the life of me work out what’s going on and I try to catch Anthony’s eye to give him a look – You still think they’re not acting weird? – but he avoids my stare, almost deliberately, his only focus on the food in front of him.

  ‘The dig?’ Mum asks Anthony out of the blue, only able to form a couple of words, wary of using the wrong terminology.

  ‘Yes,’ he replies, looking up, her face illuminating. ‘All going very well. We’ve found some real gems.’ But her smile drops when she realises that’s all she’s getting. I’ll tell you what it’s like – it’s as though my parents have been briefed to Act Normal.

  We eat the rest of our meal accompanied with staccato beats of chat, then, afterwards, Dad asks Anthony to help him make coffee in the kitchen as Mum and I move to the sofas. It occurs to me it’s somewhat over the top: all Dad’s going to do is deposit four teaspoons of granules into four cups, put some milk in a jug, and pour some sugar into a bowl. It’s not that complicated, and as I take a seat in the bluebirds-reimagined-in-magnolia sofa, I arch my back away from Mum to see if I can spot what they’re up to.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ I ask, leaning back further, trying to get a look but failing. ‘Everything seems a little off today.’

  Her eyes practically pop out of their sockets. ‘Absolutely everything’s OK!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure! What would be the matter?’

  Her reaction is hardly evidence against my theory but I put it to bed as it’s clear that whatever’s going on she doesn’t want to share. I navigate us to safer topics. I ask how her car boot sales are going, chat about Sandra and June from down the road who are, apparently, selling more homeware than clothes nowadays. She cracks her knuckles, laces her long hair behind her ears, and shifts uncomfortably in the purple skirt she’s not used to wearing – even the fleece she always wears has been eschewed – followed by an uncomfortable stretch of silence between us before Dad and Anthony return.

  ‘Here you are,’ Dad says, leaning towards me, handing me a coffee.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘What were you two whispering about in there?’ I ask, attempting to lighten the mood, as I add some milk and take a long sip.

  My dad’s cheeks blush and Anthony clears his throat.

  ‘I suppose now’s a good time,’ Anthony says ominously, looking at his watch. Then, ‘Emelia, I want you to know that we all love you and that
we’re all here for you.’

  What?

  He continues his speech and the stilted way in which it’s delivered leaves me in no doubt that it’s been painstakingly rehearsed.

  ‘I wanted to bring you to here today to discuss your treatment. I’m worried about you and your parents share my concerns.’

  I do my best not to spew my mouthful of coffee all over my mum’s twitching face, her eyes bulbous and glued to her feet as Anthony talks on her behalf. I can’t even look at my dad.

  ‘You’ve stopped eating. You’re worried about the medications you’re on. You talk about fasting as though it’s helping you recover but, now that you’ve lost so much weight, we simply have to intervene. We want you to consider checking into a facility.’

  I feel like a centenarian with impaired motor function and memory loss, being persuaded by their family to pack up into a home for safety’s sake.

  I think about my next move carefully, aware that Anthony’s desperate for me to have an emotional reaction to this. On the one hand, checking into ‘a facility’ would get me away from him, though it would only be for the short term. He’d love it if I was hospitalised, a low maintenance invalid to fuss over in a ward bed and, knowing Anthony, he’d trick the nurses into leaving me alone with him, so he could tamper with the re-feed drips they’d have me hooked up to. I can’t let him take me away. It’s too risky. On the other hand, if I don’t go to a facility, he’ll have lost this battle and there may be worse waiting for me at home.

  ‘Do you agree with this?’ I ask, looking directly at each of my parents, playing for time.

  ‘Anthony says you’ve stopped taking your medication,’ my dad replies, solemn. ‘Your condition won’t stabilise if you’re not taking it every single day. It’s a maintenance dose, it’s not optional, Ems.’