False Hope

by Lynne Lee

  ‘No! Because you always ruin it! Because you’re stupid! You’re a retard!’

  ‘Daniel!’ Matt snaps. ‘Enough of that language!’

  And it is enough. At least for me to think I know the truth of it. I remember one of my mother’s mantras. A staple from my childhood. That the only thing you need to know when catching boys making mischief is that, when interrogated, their initial default is to lie.

  Every time, she said. Worth remembering. Which I thought was outrageous. I said so. She’d shrugged. It’s true nevertheless, she said. You’ll see.

  I prise Dillon’s arms from around my middle and force him to look at me. ‘Truth now,’ I say to him. ‘Did you do it on purpose?’

  He shakes his head. ‘But I wish I had! He’s the retard!’

  We both swing into weary action with our usual four-D system. Defuse. Do a debrief. Work on damage limitation. Deliver homily – which we do and which we hope will, at some later point, stick. Daniel and Dillon don’t fight a lot, but when they do, they go big; both are still-simmering balls of regret and resentment and are likely to remain so for the rest of the day.

  But, being boys, they will shrug it off. Quickly and completely. Nothing tucked away to stew over. Because that is their special boyish gift. More likely, at some point in the future (I am absolutely sure of this), they will bring it out, dust it down, shake it out, re-examine it. And they will laugh. Do you remember the time, one will say – it could be either, it doesn’t matter – when you, or when I, or when that bloody Lego Land Rover . . . And they will laugh because the memory will be a part of what bonds them. A family heirloom of the best kind; a bit of history that connects them. That binds them together, as such anecdotes do. Which makes them brothers in a way that Hope and I were never sisters. I envy them that. And am grateful.

  For now, though, while Dillon goes to his room to sulk and lick his wounds, Daniel and Matt set about gathering up all the pieces, so the Land Rover can rise, phoenix-like, from the multicoloured plastic ashes. And I contemplate the rest of the day with a profound feeling of gloom. Visit mother. Return home. Miserable early-evening dinner (detente will, by then, probably still be a while away), boys to bed, Matt to London. And then I’ll be alone again, with a head full of horrors.

  Matt thinks I’m insane. ‘Why?’ he says, when I go into the living room to tell him I’m going to nip down to the hospital. ‘You only just went to see her yesterday.’

  ‘And she was asleep.’

  ‘What difference does that make? She probably wouldn’t remember even if she hadn’t been.’

  I head back out into the hall, pull my coat from the newel post. ‘She’s sick, Matt.’

  He follows me. ‘She’ll still be sick whether you go and see her or not. Or are you thinking she’s really sick? As in dying?’

  I shake my head. ‘No, but I just need to check on her. She’ll be disorientated, frightened. I can’t leave her there all day without seeing a familiar face.’

  He shakes his head. ‘After everything you’ve just found out? She’s lucky you haven’t totally disowned her.’

  ‘I’m trying to see past that. I’m not sure it’s going to be helpful. Anyway, I’m not just going for her, I’m going because I’ll feel bad if I don’t go.’

  ‘Because you’re worried people will think badly of you if you don’t show your face.’

  ‘Partly.’

  ‘Which is not a valid reason. And you can see her tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Noted and noted.’ I pull my car keys from my bag. ‘I shouldn’t be gone more than an hour.’

  I drive to the hospital feeling cross and guilty. Feeling cross for feeling guilty. And anxious now, as well, because I know there’s a very good chance Norma will be there. But at least that practical problem, to an extent, can be ameliorated. As I drive, I plan a route through the hospital that will keep me away from ICU and, for good measure, don’t head to the hospital car park but instead down to the front, where I park on the promenade, as if part of a SWAT team secretly crossing enemy lines. I arrive on the geriatric ward on reluctant, heavy legs.

  In contrast to yesterday, Mum is wide, wide awake. But her expression is blank when she sees me approaching, and at first I think she’s perhaps moved on to the next stage of her dementia, and, as I know will be coming one day (but perhaps not as soon as this day), has absolutely no idea who I am. I wonder, guiltily, if that will be better.

  I’m wrong. ‘Oh, you’re here then,’ she snaps once I reach her. ‘About time. Leaving me to rot in this place with all these idiots. They think I’m doolally,’ she adds, lowering her voice a little. ‘But I’m not! They’re the doolally ones, all those nurses.’

  The first thing I notice is that her bedside cabinet is covered in cards now. So has Holly been to see her? Almost certainly. So I needn’t have come after all. I try and fail not to mind. There is no sign of the pictures the boys brought for her yesterday.

  I perch on the visitor chair, and the action of my sitting down creates enough of a gust of air that half the cards flutter to the floor, like so many pale, dying moths.

  All those friends. Who all care for her. Who do not share our history. Whose relationships with her are in the landscape of the present. Which are simple and mutual, untroubled by malevolent ghosts.

  They have it licked, I think. Their cloudy gazes hold a clarity that seems to constantly escape me. Say that whatever she is, whatever she’s done in the past, it’s all done with. The slate needs to be wiped. After all, she’s a little old lady who will be dead soon. They wouldn’t say it, but they would think it. They’d think get over yourself.

  I wish I could work out a route to that acceptance. I’ve been struggling, in any case, but now I know how systematically she betrayed me – for just how long she lied – it’s like someone has felled a tree and dumped it in the road in front of me. How could she have done what she did to me? It breaks my heart. Not a big, noisy break. Nothing showy or dramatic. But she’s chipped away a piece of my heart nonetheless. ‘I haven’t left you here, Mum,’ I say, grateful to be occupied in gathering all the cards up again, since once again I am finding it difficult to look at her.

  So many cards. The Beeches is a bit like a school in that respect; a primary school, swinging, as if a battalion, into action. Let’s do what we can to make the poorly child feel better. There must be twenty or more of them, of all types and sizes. Plucked from boxes-for-the-purpose, kept by better people than I am. I sit up again. Place the cards back on the cabinet, in a disorderly pile. Then, conscious of her glare, I pick them up again and square them off. She can stand them all up again when I’m gone. ‘Mum, they’re keeping you in because you have a kidney infection, and they need to be sure you’re on the mend before they discharge you.’

  ‘On the mend. I’m not a child, Grace. And I don’t need to be here. I haven’t got a kidney infection, I’ve just got a chill.’ She sits forward slightly. ‘They all think I’m doolally. I am NOT doolally! Now, where are my boys?’

  Why do I let that term get to me so much? Why does it still make my hackles rise the way it does? ‘At home, Mum. With Matt. They came to see you yesterday.’

  ‘No they didn’t.’

  ‘You were asleep. The nurse didn’t want us to wake you.’ I almost add, And brought you pictures. Where are the pictures? But it’s pointlessness personified, so I don’t.

  She scowls. ‘When can I go home?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know, Mum. Just not yet.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ she huffs, slamming her head back against the pillows. ‘I thought you were supposed to be in charge here. Or so you’re always telling me. So are you or aren’t you? And where are my boys? Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, young lady.’ She waggles an accusatory finger towards my face. ‘I’m not an idiot. You’d do well to remember that.’

  I stay only long enough to prove beyond doubt that ther
e is no benefit in my lingering, as Mum is becoming shriller and more agitated by the moment. A nurse comes over and, after distracting her with a ‘Get Well Soon’ helium balloon (which I feel sure is meant for someone else, and will presumably find its way to the correct bedside eventually), she motions me aside, a few steps from the bed.

  ‘Try not to let it get to you,’ she counsels. ‘Sometimes you just have to cut your losses and run. She’ll have forgotten all about it the minute you’ve gone, you’ll see. Be right as rain again. And don’t forget,’ she adds, ‘it’s always the ones they feel closest to that they tend to be the most unkind to. If you can try to see it that way, it will help.’

  It’s the sweetest, rightest thing she could say, even though I’m not sure it’s true. In vino veritas. I suspect in dementia veritas too, at least sometimes. ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I’ll try to keep that in mind.’

  I tell Mum I’m off. Say goodbye. She ignores me.

  When I leave the hospital, I take the same complicated detour I used to get there, and emerge on to the street with the same sense of having escaped enemy territory. Which, to some extent, I remind myself, I just have. My mother is up there. Aidan Kennedy is up there. His mother will no doubt be up there as well. The only missing person in the mix is its architect.

  I head back down to the prom along the side street I came up, clutching my coat lapels together against a stiff onshore breeze, which is barrelling its way between the houses, herding twigs and scraps of litter into miniature tornadoes. And by the time I’m on the front again, I realise it’s strangely appropriate that I should have chosen this route, given that my dead sister, and the consequences of what she’s done, are both so much on my mind.

  Because, down on the prom, I can see myself twenty-eight years earlier, looking up at the hospital I’ve just emerged from. I’m at almost the exact spot where Hope and I stood all those years back, and, though she didn’t know it, my professional future was sealed.

  It had been four days after Dad left, home a Hammer House of Horrors, as Mum, way beyond trying to maintain a brave face, lurched from room to room, variously weeping, or shouting, or sobbing down the phone to friends, or – the most frightening – randomly grabbing heavy objects and hurling them against the walls. It was (naturally) the beginning of the school summer holidays, and my escape room – the local library – was no longer available, since it was understood (‘Grace, for pity’s sake, just do as you are told, please!’) that my role in the hurricane-tossed boat we were sailing was, at all times, to Look After Hope. Hope, who had not the least interest in going to the library, and once there, would doubtless kick off and make it impossible for us to stay.

  So we’d get the bus into town and tramp the length of the seafront, and she’d ask endless questions, like what was going to happen to us? Would we ever see Daddy again? Would Mummy be put in a mental hospital? Would we end up in a children’s home? Would Aurélie be arrested by the gendarmes? Because wasn’t there a law about stealing children’s daddies?

  This day was different. No questions, just tears. Because, rattling down the stairs, having gone back up them to grab her backpack, she had overheard something that she was never going to un-hear. My mother, pressing cash into my palm (I recall the sound of the ten-pound note crunching into my hand as if it were yesterday), saying, ‘I don’t know – anywhere. Just, for God’s sake, get her out of my sight!’

  There was worse. At some point – I don’t know when – during those hot, hellish days, Hope had stumbled upon something that had already rocked her. A letter from our father’s new – not so new, as it turned out – girlfriend, tucked inside a book on the desk in his study. It had been written just a couple of months previously, right before we had all gone away as a family for a cheap cottage break down in Cornwall. (Why, I’ve always wondered? What was the deal there? Did he think taking us to the seaside – we already had a seaside – would somehow ameliorate the damage of what he was about to do?)

  She had not minced her words. I know the holiday will be tedious (the stand-out line for Hope, that) but it will quickly be over, and we will be reunited, mon chéri.

  I’d had to squint to read it against the bright July sunshine. Had to hold the paper tight to stop the wind snatching it from me. I remember reading ‘holiday’ and hearing Aurélie’s voice, saying ‘’oliday’. Remember thinking really? Actually writing mon chéri? Did she not realise how utterly naff her Frenglish sounded? How utterly unoriginal were her words? Like Hope, I particularly remember the word ‘tedious’. Can see the damning string of letters, just as she’d written them, even now. She knew that much about it. Us. What on earth had he said to her? And what part, precisely, had he then found so tedious? The walks to get ice creams? The sandcastle-building? The day when, at dawn, we’d taken buckets and spades to the rocky end of the shoreline, and dug for razor clams and tiny crabs and cockleshells? I was sixteen. It was MY job to declare holidays tedious. His, surely, to cherish those final few days with us, when we were still a family, still whole. Yet he’d obviously already decided it would be tedious.

  But mostly I remember Hope, on the prom, on that morning in Brighton, looking up at me, her cheeks pink, saying, ‘We’re orphans now, aren’t we? To all intents and purposes?’ Then she’d scowled up at the sun. ‘Well, at least I am,’ she’d finished.

  And I’d smiled, and I’d hugged her, said, of course we’re not, stupid. And I’d told her she’d made me giggle, for the first time in ages, with the comical way she’d huffed ‘to all intents and purposes’, with her fists bunched up so tight against her skinny hips.

  But at that very same moment, I had looked up towards the hospital, whose creamy frontage I could just spy above the terraced streets between us. And what had previously been an ambition had in that moment become a yearning. I ran pell-mell towards it, never daring to look behind me, because I knew that if I thought too much about what I was leaving behind, I might never escape.

  My little sister did know, I realise. I was abandoning her too.

  No wonder she couldn’t bear to have Aidan taken away from her. He was all she had left. How can I find it in me to blame her?

  Chapter 22

  When I was in the upper sixth at school, just before the deadline for applying to study medicine, I had the opportunity, along with half a dozen others, to spend a few days at a medical school in the north of England, to get a snapshot of what life as a doctor might be like. We stayed in halls of residence, went to lectures, and toured the hospital they were attached to; and on the last day, via a video link, we watched an operation. Watched in real time, as a surgeon, wearing a head-mounted camera, talked us through as he replaced a patient’s hip.

  I had never seen anything quite so compelling. Or as unlike anything I’d ever imagined surgeons did. My diet of TV medical dramas had misled me. Yes, I had most of the images correct; how they gowned up, made incisions, probed around cavities. How they prodded and cauterised. How they excised and inserted and stitched. I knew all about babies being hauled out of bloody wombs. About catheters, and ventilators, and ever-bleeping monitors. How the patient’s journey was told via multicoloured snail trails.

  But I’d never seen an artificial hip being put in. Had no idea about all the tools, the contortions, the sheer brute force they had to use. Hadn’t expected the enormous physicality of it all. Had no idea it would all be so thrilling.

  It really was theatre. A show unlike any other. One girl fainted. Two others switched to biomedical sciences as soon as they were home again. But I was hooked. I’d found the job I was made for.

  Nothing has changed. Theatre is still my safe space. My sterile sanctuary. So when I arrive at work on Monday morning, my spirits can’t help but lift, despite the constant buzz of anxiety and foreboding. I have a full day of operating, which makes it my favourite kind of work day, and I’m acutely aware that, not a very long way from here, someone else is in theatre, undergoing surgery of a very different kind, at the end of which
no anaesthetist will bring him round again.

  The day whooshes past in the way days in theatre always do, and when I hear my mobile ring I’m surprised to find it’s already past four. I’m scrubbing up with Sid, in the side room, while the last patient of the day is prepped, and as my phone’s still in theatre, Terry, one of the ODAs, goes to fetch it. He returns holding it aloft. ‘Someone called Isabel?’

  I know Isabel wouldn’t call me at work unless it was important. She would text me. I think back towards this morning, and the sourness that still lingered after another small skirmish about whose turn it was to clean out Mr Weasley. I wonder if the boys have had a falling-out again.

  With my hands out of commission now, Terry holds the phone to my ear. ‘Is everything okay?’ I ask her.

  ‘Grace, I’m so sorry to bother you, but Dillon’s not come home yet. Might he have gone to have tea at a friend’s, perhaps? There’s nothing on the calendar.’

  I check the time again. Four fifteen now. And school ends at three twenty. And we both know there is nothing. We are scrupulous with the calendar. Which is why I can hear the slight anxiety in her voice. ‘No,’ I say. ‘At least, not that I’m aware of. Is Daniel home?’

  ‘Yes, he’s just arrived. And he can’t think of anything. And Dillon’s teacher said he left with his usual friends, so I thought I ought to check with you before getting in a flap. We’ll walk up to the park, then. He’s probably there and just forgotten the time. Don’t worry.’

  She promises she’ll keep me posted. Says don’t worry a second time. And right now I need to concentrate on the hip I’m replacing; my patient’s already anaesthetised and ready. I finish scrubbing up. All being well, it should take no more than an hour. But as I put on fresh gloves, worry starts to stalk me anyway. Dillon walks home, with three friends, to the corner of our lane. He does not forget the time, because he does not forget the rules. He is allowed to walk home with his friends on that condition. He knows that unless something different has already been arranged, he must meet Isabel at the end of our lane. That is the rule.