by Jo Gatford
The nights are the worst. They are neither peaceful nor quiet. Angela bought me a radio that plays ‘the sounds of nature’, supposedly to help me fall asleep: rain, rivers, storms, the sea and so forth. I don’t see the point unless you are unable to urinate. No amount of rain can drown out ‘the sounds of the nursing home’: howling, grunting, coughing, dying and so forth. I failed to hide my unimpressed reaction when I unwrapped it and she called me a grumpy bastard. What’s wrong with a normal radio? One that I can actually listen to? One with longwave so I can pick up the cricket now and then? I don’t mean to offend her but I invariably do.
Whenever a purple-uniformed staff member passes me I pause, checking to see if their face belongs to Angela. I’ve lost track of her shift pattern and don’t want to have to ask. I consult a list tucked behind my eyelids: pointed chin, skin tight and shiny over her forehead, hair that curls and spirals into helices on her shoulders, eyes that grow harder by the week. The image of her dissolves whenever I try to grip hold of it. I will recognise her when I see her. I know her when I see her through a doorway.
When she was ten and Alex had just been born, I asked if she wanted to call me Dad. She looked at me kindly and said, “Peter’s fine.” I don’t know why I suggested it. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable with it either, and was glad she refused. It must have been the thrill of a new baby, the idea of a family, cementing us together. I felt a grizzled, primal pain in my chest when I saw Alex for the first time. I can’t remember when I first felt that for Matthew, but it was there just now, revisiting that empty house, that longest night.
Matthew’s birth, his birthday, every instance of small talk that leads back to his heritage - each one is shadowed with Heather’s disappearance. She is a black hole into which conversation is sucked, compressed and blinked out of existence.
I come to a double doorway at the end of a corridor but I know it will not take me anywhere new. It is an earthly thing, a man-made slab of fire-resistant timber and safety glass, nothing special about it at all. I step through into the next corridor. The same synthetic carpeting, although I recognise this hallway - it will bring me back to the semblance of home they managed to cram into my room.
Angela must not be working today. She would have come to see me if she had been. She will keep up her mask of stoicism until I am dead. I ought to tell her to stop, tell her that it’s okay for her not to be okay. I’m not her father but I have been her Peter for most of her life. I ought not to have let them put me in this place. She should be allowed to be a visitor and not my nurse. But perhaps that’s what she’s always been.
I turn left into the little cul-de-sac that contains my room and three others. Both my door, and the one opposite, are open. I stand between them and try to remember why I came back here. Something about Angela.
The sound of artificial breathing swishes into the corridor like a tide. In the room across the hall resides a skeletal being who has been kept silently but barely alive since I arrived here. She may actually be stuffed for all I can tell. Her door is permanently ajar. She sits there, propped up on her bed, unmoving and stern-faced, like Mother Whistler. At some point every day a machine next to her deathbed emits a beeping of ever-increasing pitch and volume until a nurse comes scuttling down the hall to switch it off. They will readjust a pillow or two, open or shut the curtains, pull the covers up a few inches, neaten a crease, and leave her to the oceanic rhythm of her ventilator.
I saw her move, once. The machine beeped but no-one came. I saw Whistler turn her head my way, then further, like an owl, and further still, until she looked almost one-hundred-and-eighty degrees behind her to stare yearningly at the glass of water on her bedside table. Then she fell right out of bed like a bag of kindling. She broke her collar bone and was in the hospital for two weeks before she returned, plastered, but no different. She doesn’t have any visitors. Maybe that’s the way to be. Quiet and patient and waiting for the end. I wonder if that would make Angela happy, to let her think that I’m taking this live deconstruction with some sort of grace. I want to shield her from my corrosion but I’ve never been able to lie to her. She’s the only one who can cope with what is going to happen to me. The boys can’t do this. Matthew resents every visit and Alex has stopped coming. Angela has always been the strongest of all of us - she takes appraisal of a situation in seconds before coming up with some sort of certainty. A direction. A way forward.
When she came to tell me she was pregnant, at twenty-one, with no husband, boyfriend or even a vague acquaintance to raise it with, she had no fear of my reaction. I, however, broke into a sweat.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You want to keep it, don’t you?”
She nodded. Smiled, even.
I didn’t know why she needed approval from me, she knew I would have agreed, whatever she’d said. I had to say something, though. “Then, why don’t you move back in with us?”
We celebrated with more nodding and standing around awkwardly. I have always been too scared of inappropriate repercussions to instigate a full hug, and she has always been happy with just resting her hand on top of mine.
She was due in the summer. She and I sat one afternoon in the garden, radio on, papers divided between us, discarded sections splayed on the grass. She couldn’t seem to concentrate on reading, her belly conspicuously taking up her view. During an ad break on the radio she turned to me and said, “Do you think Heather disappeared because she was afraid?”
I didn’t have to tell her. I didn’t have to tell her anything at all, let alone the truth. I didn’t lie, at least. “Yes,” I said.
“It’s a scary thing,” she said, pressing her bellybutton down and watching it ping back out again.
“Yes. It is.”
“Did she seem happy? When Matt was born?”
I shrugged, sighed. “Not really, no. She was in shock, I think.”
“In shock. For all these years?”
I lifted my eyes to hers, just to warn her that she was getting close to the limit of her questions. She stared innocently back, newspaper face down on her enormous bump, toes scrunching grass.
“I think she was too embarrassed to come back,” I said.
Angela nodded and turned back to her reading, twisting the radio volume up as music resumed. I was sweating, despite being in the shade. What is it about that girl that makes me sweat? I flicked the paper upright, feeling cautiously safe that her curiosity had been sated, but then:
“Peter?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think Matt knows why his mum disappeared?”
“No.”
“But you do?”
I paused. She would have known if I’d lied. “Yes.”
“Are you ever going to tell him?”
She didn’t look at me when she asked, which made it easier to tell the truth.
“No.”
A painful beeping sound that doesn’t belong in the garden with Angela. Mother Whistler’s machine is alive with lights. The door to my room sits half-open and it makes me feel sick. I need to see Angela’s face, to remind myself what she looks like. If I walk the halls for long enough I’ll find her. I’ll find her and I’ll admit I’m losing her, I’ll admit that I can’t remember why Alex won’t see me, I’ll ask her what I’ve done to make him stay away. I can’t lie to her. Sometimes I think she has more of me in her than my sons do.
Chapter Five
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 cushio
ns.
“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.
