False Hope

by Lynne Lee

  The artificial lights at least lifted my mood. Matt had obviously been busy while I was at work, coming good on the promise he’d made the boys yesterday, finally bringing us into line with the scattering of new neighbours, whose houses had been festively bedecked since the beginning of December. Strange, now that neighbours were both less close and fewer, that I felt their presence, their silent scrutiny, so much more.

  A memory mushroomed up as I turned into the lane, and our home, dressed for the season, fully revealed itself. Of that last Christmas before Hope died, Aidan by then long gone, and Matt being co-opted to help me embellish hers. Dillon too young to care, Hope too drugged to take it in, but one moment of lucidity – G, this is going to be our last Christmas! – held too much power, too much pathos, for us not to do it for her.

  I pulled into the drive, to see the living-room curtains were, unusually, already closed, and a shard of light, hastily extinguished, told me why. The boys were already in the garage doorway by the time I opened it, jumping from foot to foot in their excitement. So they’d obviously done the tree as well.

  ‘Come on, come on!’ Daniel sang.

  Dillon tugged me by the sleeve. ‘Close your eyes! Dad, Da–ad! Mum’s home!’ And I was duly bustled through to the living room, Daniel – older and taller – reaching up to cover my eyes before I was allowed to see again (if only darkness), just before Matt pressed the switch for them.

  ‘Wow,’ I said, meaning it. ‘It looks amazing.’

  ‘We aced it, didn’t we, Dad?’ Dillon said. ‘Proper aced it.’

  Matt stuck a thumb up. ‘We did, son.’

  And in my younger son’s eyes, I saw something I’d never seen before. Because sometimes you just forget and other times you make a point to. I’d had no photo reference (God forbid), no ongoing comparison, definitely no wish to seek one. Yet there it was anyway, as if newly minted. I saw his biological father. An unwelcome intrusion into a present he had no part in.

  ‘You did,’ I agreed, hugging him, chasing it away. ‘It’s magnificent.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s dinnertime,’ Matt said. ‘Thought I’d head off around ten,’ he added, to me, looking sad. I felt suddenly emotional, about the unwelcome intrusion I’d foisted on him too.

  ‘I know,’ I said, touching his arm. ‘Sorry. Mum and everything.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said. Even though it wasn’t.

  ‘But I think I’ve sorted it,’ I told him, as we trooped back into the kitchen. It smelled of the waiting roast dinner, which I was almost too tired to eat. ‘She’s been playing with her tech again.’

  ‘I knew that was going to create more problems than it would solve,’ he said.

  But we didn’t know, I wanted to say. How could we have known? It’s like having a baby – you can’t know. You’re in unknown territory. You can only guess.

  I didn’t. I said, to the room in general, ‘Wow, this looks delicious. I could eat, let me see, a whole hairy hippopotamus.’

  ‘Hippopotamuses don’t have hair,’ Daniel said, with conviction. ‘Hey, but, Mum, guess what? You know Fortnite?’

  I did. Way more than I ever imagined I would. And so, as he told me more about his latest battle royale (he was obsessed with the game), we recalibrated. Ate. Performed all the soothing Sunday-night rituals. Then it was ten, the boys in bed, and Matt’s case was in the hall. As it had been at the end of every weekend since September, while he finished an engineering project he was heading up in London. As it would be till March, maybe April. When he’d hopefully find a new job – he was putting out feelers already – that would slot into a life that, for the entirety of our marriage, had been dominated by the demands of my career in the NHS. He used to joke, often (especially when we were out somewhere socially), that he was married to the health service as much as he was married to me. He didn’t make that joke any more.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked. ‘I can stay if you like. Leave in the morning.’ I knew he’d picked up on my mood, my preoccupation with Aidan Kennedy, the image of whom I couldn’t seem to shift. Who kept popping up in my mind’s eye now, baleful, angry, accusing, despite there being no grounds for him feeling any of those things. But Matt didn’t – couldn’t – know about that. Patient confidentiality is sacrosanct over all. Certainly above domestic tensions, which, right now, it could only add to, because Matt naturally thought it was something to do with him.

  I shook my head. ‘I’m fine. I’m just weary. Difficult day.’

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  And somehow, my treacherous, sleep-deprived brain called it wrong. I shook my head again. Added, ‘To be honest, I just need my bed.’

  Not him. That’s how he read it. Not wanted. Not needed.

  ‘Noted,’ he said, picking up his case. ‘I’ll get off then.’

  I went to kiss him. Got a cheek. A chilly one, and I cursed myself.

  I kept on cursing myself as I watched him climb into his car and drive off, blowing kisses at him and waving madly till his tail lights rounded the corner, knowing I wouldn’t go to sleep till he was back in London anyway. Then closed the door with an increasingly familiar sense of things not being quite right. As if our compass had got confused in a storm.

  I padded around then, turning lights off, and double-checking window locks and doors, in a way I never used to when we were still in London. There was little sense in this new vigilance, given that our city lives had put us in harm’s way almost daily, yet here, where it would be an event if a potted bay tree went missing, my responsibility for the boys’ safety, especially when I was alone with them, which I was through the week, weighed on my mind so much more heavily.

  The dark was truly dark here. Medieval in its blackness. And, apart from the occasional thrill of a tawny owl screeching (Daniel loved owls), the night silence was also absolute at this time of year, in a way that city nights never are. It was dark down on the ground here. It was silent in the undergrowth. All the light and noise, the stars and birds, were up above. Were I to have to run with them, escape with them, that darkness would be terrifying.

  I heard my phone ringing in the kitchen just as I was heading up to bed. It wouldn’t be work – another team had now picked up the on-call baton. It might be Mum. I hoped not. I hoped it was Matt, who had already texted (Home safe. No worries. Smile emoji. One kiss) in response to my rather longer one: Sorry to be such a grouch. Nasty RTC this morning, had to perform an amputation. Bit of a grim day all round really. Sorry to take it out on you. I didn’t mean to.

  It wasn’t Matt. It was from an unfamiliar mobile phone number.

  I said hello. Heard a breath. Not a heavy one. Just a breath.

  I said hello a second time. Strained to hear through the soupy silence. Added, ‘Who is this?’

  Another breath. Another second. Then, ‘Grace?’

  It was a voice I thought I recognised. But could it really be?

  ‘Aidan?’

  There was a beep then. A brief rustling. And the phone disconnected.

  I called back. It rang once. Then went dead.

  Chapter 3

  Just as trauma trumps orthopaedics every time, so, for me, physical exhaustion almost always wins the battle over emotional. So, despite the unsettling phone call, which should have kept me awake – was it Aidan? – I realised I must have fallen asleep in a matter of minutes, because when I woke up – suddenly, anxiously – my cheek was stuck to my Kindle, as if to prove it.

  It was Dillon who’d woken me. A hot little hand on my exposed shoulder.

  ‘Can I come into bed with you, Mummy?’ he whispered. ‘I’m frightened. I keep hearing noises.’

  It was the house. The new-old house, which wheezed and groaned and grumbled. I heard Matt’s voice. Bad habits. Take him straight back to bed.

  But it was almost five. My alarm would be going off soon anyway. So I ignored it, sliding across enough so he could slip in beside me. Dillon was asleep again in seconds, but now I was wide awake, brain whirring, picki
ng up the stitch I must have dropped when sleep won the battle, and now tugging on it once again, forcefully.

  Was it Aidan Kennedy who phoned me last night? Every instinct told me yes.

  And if it was, why? To try and extract a promise that I wouldn’t spill the beans about his past? I imagined his metaphorical arms – of which he would still have two, obviously – already windmilling frantically around his head, trying to bat away the inrush of terrifying thoughts. He would be panicking by now, I knew. Might even be hysterical. An arm was a big thing to lose, after all. Arguably, more profoundly disabling than a leg. As a surgeon, I understood that. And as an able-bodied human. Arms, hands and fingers, versus legs, feet and toes.

  As if to illustrate, when Dillon whimpered, I automatically folded both arms tighter around him. I was worried about him. Fearful that he was anxious about making friends, even though every time I’d gently probed, he was adamant he was fine. I buried my nose in his shampoo-soft mop of hair.

  Which put me uncomfortably in mind of Aidan again. It had to be him, didn’t it? But would he even have access to a phone? Let alone the wherewithal to make a one-handed call. He must have only just been transferred out of ICU, surely? And have been dosed up with opiates, physically drained and exhausted. How would he still have my number, for that matter? No, I chided myself, that was ridiculous. Why would he not still have my number? I hadn’t changed it since I had my first mobile.

  Though that he would have, and probably more than once, wouldn’t have surprised me. Hard to run away with your past weighing you down. So much easier to just jettison it. Let it go.

  In contrast to the day before, Monday’s dawn arrived damp, dull and sulky, the frost on the lawn gone and the woods at the end of the garden obscured by shifting skeins of mist. It must have been ten degrees warmer than it had been this time yesterday, and the white Narnian landscape had lost its dangerous beauty; it was now the dull green of overcooked kale.

  On weekdays, I dropped Daniel to his high school just outside Brighton on my way into work, and Isabel, the girl who helped us out with the boys, walked Dillon to the village primary school an hour later. Only to school, however. A big part of becoming accepted, I knew, was becoming ‘one of the gang’, by being allowed to walk home – at least to the end of our lane, where Isabel was permitted to wait for him. After all, he was in year six. He was ten now. Not seven. And the tug on my maternal apron strings was too strong to ignore. And this isn’t London, I reminded myself, endlessly.

  When I came downstairs after getting dressed and helping him hunt down his pencil case, Isabel was heading in through the front door bearing bin bags as big as gym balls, moving gingerly, crabbing in, keeping them away from her legs.

  ‘Present from Mum,’ she explained, in response to my raised eyebrows. ‘Foliage. She thought you might like to make use of it. Mostly holly.’ Her strange gait began to make sense now. ‘But there’s a bunch of eucalyptus and some mistletoe as well. Oh, and an Oasis ring. I thought we might make a wreath for the front door after school.’

  Isabel was the granddaughter of one of the residents where Mum lived. I’d already met her a couple of times, on my increasingly frequent visits down from London, and it was during one of those, when we started looking in earnest for a new home near Brighton, that her gran told us she was keen to find some temporary work. She’d just finished her A levels, and, prior to spending six months travelling round South-East Asia with her boyfriend, she was hoping to find some part-time childcare-related employment to add to her CV, as her longer-term goal was to become a paediatric nurse.

  It was as if it had been meant, childcare being our most pressing problem. Back in London, with both the boys at the same local primary, Matt would drop them to school before work every morning and I’d pick them up from after-school club. Without Matt, and among strangers, the whole edifice crumbled, as those kinds of constructions so often tend to. An Isabel in our lives would be a lifesaver.

  Well, in theory, because if not quite a leap in the dark, it was still a step in the near-dark – one of many we’d had to make more using instinct than planning. Our instinct in this case being that as her gran was lovely, and she was so lovely to her gran (the evidence was widely accepted as incontrovertible), why not Isabel, over anyone we could find via an agency, to ride to our childcare-gap rescue?

  We’d bonded immediately, not least because her family situation had so closely mirrored my own. Her dad, a police detective, had left her mum and since remarried, and though she’d adapted and still got on well with her father, I knew we bore similar scars. She too had been sixteen when he’d walked out.

  ‘Guilt money,’ she’d laughed when she first visited and I admired her brand-new car – a surprise eighteenth birthday gift from him. ‘And I’m cool with that!’ she’d added firmly.

  I knew then that we were going to get on.

  Isabel’s mum was a florist. She had a shop down in the lanes. In the four months we’d been living here, there had been many such presents. She was grateful to us in a way I completely related to, but at the same time completely underestimated, I think, the depth of gratitude flowing back in the other direction. I wanted to hug Isabel daily. I often did. But not today. Instead, I stepped back up on to the stairs so she and her vicious bin bags could pass by without snagging my tights.

  Before the brain tumour pitched up, Hope, too, had been a florist. Not in a shop, though. She was never one for normal working hours, because she didn’t ‘do’ normal. Hope liked her lifestyle like she’d always liked her boyfriends. She liked edgy. She liked fringes. Extremely late nights and ridiculously early mornings. Sometimes within the same twenty-four-hour period. She was never happier than when awake while the rest of the world slept. When she was nineteen she had the word ‘hedonist’ tattooed, in tiny writing, on the nape of her neck.

  Hope worked – hard and well; she had been good at the job in which she had finally found a passion, for a firm who specialised in floral creations for events. High-end weddings, corporate gatherings, award ceremonies, banquets. She’d text me. Wahhhh! I’m on BBC Breakfast! Or Check out these roses! Or, on one occasion, G, find a television RIGHT NOW! They’re interviewing Joanna Lumley by my bower!

  And if I could I always would, because it mattered to her that I cared. Because Mum, who Hope had long realised could never see beyond her disappointment (in life, in love, and especially in her second daughter), seemed not to care much at all.

  I followed Isabel through to the kitchen, where Daniel was finishing his breakfast. ‘Yo, DI Dan,’ Isabel said. ‘How’s it hanging?’

  Isabel already had pet names for them both. My older son – Detective Inspector Dan, to Dillon’s Detective Sergeant Dill – was, in real life, usually the cheerful Sergeant Lewis to Dillon’s more introverted Inspector Morse. But he was currently desperate to be selected for one of the year seven football teams, which happy circumstance was by no means assured. He was settling in okay, but I knew getting picked would mean the world to him. I kept telling myself that it would have been just the same in London; that settling into a new high school would still be the same scary step. That getting on a team wouldn’t have been a given there, either. But coupled with the move, it couldn’t help but matter more. Because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have his mates to console him, just as I no longer had my little coterie of girlfriends.

  We’re doing the right thing, I told myself. This is the right thing for all of us. Was it, though? After the last twenty-four hours, I was having a major rethink.

  ‘Yo, Iz,’ he said, through a mouthful of Weetabix.

  He looked visibly brighter at the sight of her. Though I suspected he had a crush on her, which only added to my gnawing, increasing anxiety that this state of affairs was just temporary. Come the middle of March, Matt would hopefully be down properly, which would make everything easier, but Isabel would be gone after Easter. Which meant the boys would have to adjust to yet another change. I knew they would do so in thei
r own characteristic ways. Daniel head down and plough through it. Dillon more Sturm und Drang. Whatever else was true about them, one thing seemed inescapable. That nature usually holds sway over nurture.

  I went across to him, wanting nothing more than to gather him up and give him a bear hug, but, reading the rules (ever shifting as he approached adolescence), I restricted myself to planting a kiss on his head instead, before doing my usual turn around the kitchen, ticking off items on my Monday-morning checklist. Packed lunches. PE kits. Money for a school trip. Cruising round the kitchen island like a tracking drone.

  Finally, I unplugged my phone from where it spent the not-on-call nights. And noticed, by the ‘calls’ button, the number three.

  More missed calls in the night, then. On any other morning recently, my first thought would have been Mum, but this morning it wasn’t. It was Aidan.

  I clicked through to the detail, already anticipating what I might find, even as I railed against how preposterous it was that our paths should have crossed again in such an unlikely way. But was it really that unlikely? I was a trauma surgeon, after all. And Aidan’s life had always been a car crash in waiting.

  Waiting for our fates to collide? Because that’s what it felt like.

  I was right. Same mobile. Four twenty, four twenty-one, four twenty-four, no voicemail.

  But there was something else. A text message. Sent just a minute later. One word. In capitals. BITCH.

  Two things occurred to me as I stared at my phone, the first being to wonder if it was the calls that had disturbed Dillon? Highly likely. And the second, that there was a certain kind of person who, sleepless, stressed, and anxious, would think nothing of sending a text in the middle of the night, calling someone a bitch. I knew because I’d seen a few texts like that before. And worse. Ones sent to my sister.