White Lies

by Jo Gatford

  “Where did he get it from?”

  She looks at me predominantly with her left eye, as if it is the more judgemental of the two.

  I laugh. “I have not given my dad any weed.” I have to sit down. Honour is glaring. “And neither has Angela.” My face is stuck in a rictus grin. I am not helping, I can tell.

  “That isn’t the only incident that occurred yesterday,” she continues, and it gets better. I don’t mean to laugh, I mean, I really don’t. She tells me about Paul and the fork and Dad falling sweetly asleep afterwards and not remembering a thing. I bite the insides of my cheeks until the flesh makes a crunching sound. They’re worried about sudden deterioration, a stroke gone unnoticed, severe changes in personality, violence, aggression, depression, drug abuse. But oh my God my dad got stoned and stabbed an old man with a fork.

  Honour folds her hands into her apron. “We haven’t found any evidence. Yet. But I need to let you know that we take possession of illegal drugs very seriously. If we were to come across any proof, we would have to ask him to leave.”

  I force my face into a frown. “Yes, of course.”

  “But because your sister - ”

  “Stepsister.” God, shut up, shut up, you moron.

  “Because your stepsister is a member of staff, I am willing to let you… have a little check yourself, before we search his room thoroughly.” The left eye is protruding again, this time accompanied by a bouncing eyebrow. She’s trying to be subtle. I nod slowly to let her know I’m in on the game.

  “Thank you.”

  “Let’s just hope it doesn’t happen again.”

  “It won’t, I promise.”

  She gives a curt nod in reply and swishes from the room. I close the door behind her and rest my head against the lacquered wood. His bed looks the type that would swallow you whole with its orthopaedic mattress and layers and layers of bedding. I could lie down – for just a moment – if I don’t sleep soon I might go on a forking rampage of my own. My jaw is so tense I cannot unclench it. Ulcers have sprouted all along my gum line.

  Fuck, it’s hot in here. I swing the window open and try to focus. I need to sweep my way through his room before he wakes up. I don’t want to get caught up in that confrontation. Right. Wardrobe: clean. Chest of drawers: clean. Miscellaneous boxes of photos and my grandfather’s military insignia: clean. Shoes: clean. I consider my dad’s level of sneakiness and check the hems of his curtains and the top of his wardrobe: clean. Drawers under the bed: clean. Ah. Behind the drawers under the bed: a shoebox. It rattles and shuffles when shaken. I pull it out amidst a wave of dust-sneezes. Inside: pills. Pills? Has he been hiding his meds? A dusty little bag of skunk. I pocket it. It’s sweet and plump and strong. Dad, you cheeky bastard.

  But my smile reverses when I see what lies at the bottom of the box.

  Letters. Signed Heather.

  #

  I’m gone before Angela’s finished dealing with her patient, before Dad wakes up, before I put my head through a wall. I’m gone without the letters and I’m driving without really focusing my eyes properly.

  My phone has been ringing since I left but I shut it into the glove compartment and let it buzz itself stupid. It’s almost three o’clock. Sarah gets off early on a Friday. She wants to meet in the park by the council offices. The sky looks like snow gone to slush - a dirty wash over the sun, flat and unromantic. There are no shadows. In the park, people jog along the paths leaving no trace on the ground, the trees are just trees, the pavement just grey.

  I wait on a wet bench and the cold seeps into my damaged hip, my knee, the back of my head where the stitches pull tight as the skin knits together. Behind closed eyes, my mother’s signature has been burned onto my retinas. My dad’s lies. The dates on the envelopes spread over weeks, months after she left. No wonder he wants to die. Then he can leave all his confessions in a neat little letter of his own. Like my mother. Like Lydia.

  And there’s the difference. Alex had his letter and he was going to do something about it. I finally reach my pot of gold and I put it back where I found it. I’ve spent so many years burying her inside soft, glutinous guilt, fabricating solutions and justifications that would explain thirty-five years of silence, I can’t risk finding out that she just didn’t want me. Alex watched his mother die, internalising it into night terrors - cold, tormented feet kicking me awake whenever he crawled into my bed. Fighting something, or trying to get away, but always clinging, hanging on my pyjama sleeves for dear life. Sometimes I’d kick him back. His mother was dying and I’d kick him out of the bed onto the floor where he’d thrash until the chilled air woke him with a whimper.

  When Lydia was ill, our job was to stay quiet in the house and help with the housework. When she moved into the hospital the same rules applied: be quiet, clean and tidy. Smile. Don’t talk too much.

  Alex was ten when she died. Her absence trapped him like a rat in a box, running a loop of mad, frantic terror; wound so tight that when it gets free all it can do is go straight for your face. I can barely remember him before.

  The sun dips below the terraced houses at the edge of the park. There’s a police depot on the west side. A high slanted chain-link fence guards a fleet of police cars parked in neat, toyish lines. Alex would have climbed it, just to say he’d been inside. He was the friend I wished I’d had. Before I went off to uni he’d creep in after his curfew and sit on the floor next to my bed, swaying with adrenaline and whatever cocktail of drugs and alcohol he had in his belly. He’d tell me all the things he and Jamie had done: exploring the derelict petrol station, climbing up the high rise fire escapes and getting drunk on the roof, chasing girls into the churchyard and getting groped for their trouble. “You should’ve been there,” he would whisper breathlessly.

  And I would roll my eyes at him. I would make him feel stupid. I would make him hate me. He was my Frankenstein’s monster.

  I can’t wait for Sarah. I haul myself off the bench, stiff and limping worse than ever, down towards the bleeding sunset sky, towards the fence that I’m going to fucking climb because it’s there and it’s staring at me and it’s what I should have done years ago with my little shit of a brother.

  #

  My feet are too big to fit safely into the diamond holes of the wire fence. My hands grip onto the chains like determined claws, but halfway up my hip starts to throb, and I realise my muscles, atrophied by laziness, will be tired out before I reach the top of the fence.

  “Matt?”

  I look down and almost slip. Sarah watches me from the darkness of the park. I can’t see her face clearly but I see now she’s far too young, too likely to pity me and think it’s love.

  “What are you doing? Get down!” She adds a laugh but it’s not genuine.

  I ignore her, haul myself up over the swaying fence top, legs dangling free for a moment, twelve feet off the ground.

  “Fucking hell, be careful.”

  “Shhhhhh,” I hiss back, craning over my shoulder into the floodlit depot but there’s no-one there. I imagine letting go, dropping down to the concrete, hearing my ankles crack on impact. I take the descent too fast, arms screeching with my weight, leaping down in an ungainly abseil, a few feet at a time. The wire shakes and rattles, far too loud, and my skin flushes with low-standard pride.

  “Seriously, Matt, what are you doing?” Sarah whispers, pressing herself up against the other side of the fence.

  When I reach the ground it feels as if it is swaying. “I have no idea,” I tell her. She beckons me over and draws breath over her teeth when she sees my bruised face.

  “Poor baby.”

  Maybe she’s not too young. Maybe I’m not too old. I just climbed a fucking fence, didn’t I?

  For a second, Sarah looks like she wants to kiss me. Then her eyes flick to something behind me and a woman’s voice yells, “Oi!”

  A policewoman crosses the car park at a run and Sarah yelps. I jump at the fence and start to climb, scared clumsiness making it tw
ice as difficult this time. The policewoman reaches me in slow motion and grabs the back of my jeans, jerking me backwards and off the fence. I land on her legs and she grunts. I am too sleep-deprived to operate on anything but adrenaline and I twist around to pin her flat against the ground.

  Sarah mutters “oh shit” over and over in an endless stream of ineffectual anxiety.

  The policewoman’s eyes give away a moment of uncertainty before her training surges to the surface with indignant embarrassment. Her knee shoots up into my nuts and she shoves me sideways, reversing our positions and kneeling on my chest, grinding my wrists into gravel as she holds my arms down.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the policewoman barks, a blush sweeping from the bridge of her nose to the tips of her ears.

  “Arrest me, please,” I say. I had hoped it would have sounded more forceful than it did. I probably should have left off the ‘please’.

  She wasn’t expecting that. “Why? What have you done, besides trespassing and being an idiot?”

  “For murder,” I say. “Or manslaughter at least.”

  She doesn’t move but her fingers dig into my forearms. “Are you serious?”

  I nod. We are speaking too quietly for Sarah to hear, even with her face pressed against the fence.

  The policewoman shifts on my chest, knees pushing a little closer to my throat. “If you want me to arrest you, then you’re going to cooperate when I let you up, alright? You’re going to walk nicely with me into the station so I can ask you some questions. Right?”

  “I promise.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  Sarah starts shouting after us but I don’t bother to look back.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I listen to the gentle breathing that drifts down the phone line for several minutes before I realise it is my own.

  “Hello?”

  There are cracks in my voice that weren’t there a few years ago, a few months ago. I am pleading but nobody’s listening.

  “No answer?” the receptionist asks, taking the receiver out of my hands.

  She had to dial Matthew’s number for me because I couldn’t work out the keypad, even though of course I know how to use a bloody goddamned stupid phone. Except the numbers keep changing, and the tones make discordant music, and there was someone down the line talking to me but it wasn’t my son. Or not the right one. I can’t remember which one I was trying to call.

  I need to talk to Alex. The doorways have gone quiet. My voice is back, temporarily. The pressure in my head clamps tighter, squeezing me out of existence. I need to talk to Matthew. There’s something I need to tell him. Something I need to ask. Something about Alex.

  I push myself away from the receptionist desk - a badly orchestrated series of manoeuvres that results in a tottering stumble into the opposite wall. She moves to help but I growl at her, causing the bloodhounds at her feet to raise their heads.

  “Where’s Angela?” I demand.

  The receptionist tilts her face away and flares her nostrils as if she is a posturing bird. “You saw her this morning, Peter.”

  “I know I did. Where is she now?”

  She smiles slowly and returns to her all-knowing book of schedules, shift patterns and emergency contact numbers. “Angelaaaah,” she drawls, licking a finger and flicking over a page. “She’ll be pretty busy with dinner until six-thirty, Peter,” she explains with fake regret. “And then she’ll be going home. I can page her if you waaaant… ” Her whining vowels imply that I would be incomprehensibly selfish to insist on such a thing. Not that I want to bother her anyway. I don’t want to see her cry again.

  “Matthew?” I ask.

  She sighs and that’s always a bad sign. “Peter. He’s been and gone.”

  I want my son. I can’t wait until next week. I try to nod, clench back tears. “Yes, of course.”

  “I can call him again for you if you like.”

  “No, no.” Then, quietly, tentatively: “Alex?” It’s worth a try.

  Her eyes squint with pity. “I’m sorry, Peter.”

  Back to my room then. Perhaps Matthew will be waiting there. Maybe he’s been there all along, wondering where I’ve got to.

  “Ah, finally!” The receptionist exclaims, rolling her eyes at something behind me through the double doors that are ever so slightly too heavy for the average old person to push their way through without assistance; a clever security measure disguised as an open invitation to leave at any time. The country roads stretch for miles in every direction with no bus service and no pavements. A mid-Sussex Gulag. Nowhere to run, not that any of us can run any more.

  A hearse pulls into the car park and two funeral directors unhurriedly climb out. I shuffle faster. I don’t want to witness their jovial exchange with the receptionist. I don’t want them to eye me over, nodding politely, marking me down as an inevitable client - visions of death in satin-lined jackets.

  I tense for verbal abuse as I pass Ingrid’s half-closed door, for a screeching “Hey, Mr Solemn!” but there is nothing. Not even a cough. I push her door fully open and my guts make origami folds inside me. Her bed is fully reclined. Her face is grey and still. The rasping white noise that has served as her breathing for the last few weeks is oddly absent. My throat contracts behind my Adam’s apple, unsure whether I am trying to swallow, take in breath, or make noise. A singular low note of meditation escapes it.

  Yesterday’s crossword lies on her bedside table, annotated and smudged by unsteady fingers. Her hands have clawed themselves into fists. Her drip no longer drips, has been disconnected from her cannula, tubes and leads neatly coiled and hung from the hook. Her catheter is gone, her sheets smoothed around her body, tucked in tight. Night night, Ingrid, sleep well, sleep long, forever.

  I drop into a slow, creaky crouch, like an elderly frog, holding onto the edge of her bed for fear of drowning. The sheets are cold. She was not a small woman but her body appears to have shrunk, devoid of its spirit, its brashness. The only sound in the room is the ticking of wood panelled walls, tortured by central heating.

  “Excuse me, Sir.” A warm hand clamps under my armpit. One of the funeral directors gets down on one knee next to me. “Need a hand getting up?”

  I do, but I don’t want one. He pulls me to my feet anyway.

  “What are you doing in here?” The receptionist barks shrilly, like her bloodhounds.

  “When did she go?” I ask.

  “This morning,” she says, with only a little softening of her voice.

  There’s nothing really more to say. I shake my arm to dislodge the grip of the funeral director who peers into my face to see if there are tears. I smile and turn, swiping the audio book box set of The Lord of the Rings from her dresser on my way.

  #

  I burst through the swinging kitchen doors like a cowboy into a saloon, though with considerably less balance. The staff startle but no-one steps forward to take the responsibility of removing me. A tall porter with bad skin grimaces and hurries towards the side door when I catch his eye. “Alex!” I call after him, following at my own pace, knocking aside the halfhearted attempts to stop me.

  There is moisture in the air outside that promises rain within the next half an hour but I have nowhere to go, no appointments to keep, no plans to be ruined by the weather. Alex waits, defeated, by the back wall. I thrust the box set into his hands.

  “What’s this?” he says.

  “For you. Payment. I need some more.”

  The boy stares incredulously. “They confiscated it, mate. They thought one of your kids brought it in. Thank fuck. Look. You can’t talk to me anymore, I don’t want to get fired for this.”

  My kids. My baby boy. Alex tries to pass the box back to me but I hold his hands still. “Why don’t you visit me?”

  He pauses. “I don’t know you, mate. Sorry.”

  Confusion feels like drunkenness. He’s right but I can’t work
out how. “You… But you visited Ingrid.”

  “Not really. It’s just a bit of weed.”

  “She died,” I say, and still the tears don’t come.

  He falters. “Sorry,” the boy says. “She was cool.”

  “She was.”

  Cool like Lydia. Women who said exactly what was on their minds, regardless of who they were speaking to; who frightened me as much as they amused me. Women who died as if they’d been turned inside out, turned into a reversal of their living selves: weak and terrified and uncertain. Unwomaned. Terrordied.

  My last conversation with Ingrid had been painful and sporadic:

  “I should have had children,” she’d said. “Some nice, clean girls. No, maybe not girls. Boys have that mumsy attachment that make them feel guilty enough to look after you to the bitter end. Haven’t you seen? The men visit more than the women. Don’t roll their eyes quite so much. You’re lucky you’ve got boys.”

  I sat at her bedside, knuckling pins and needles out of my legs.

  “Oh I’ve got friends, but who wants to come all the way out here? No bus, too expensive for a taxi. I don’t blame them.”

  I folded my legs under the chair, folded my hands in my lap, folded my lips into well-worn grooves and listened to her choke on her own breath. “Your sister?”

  “Yvonne? She’d be too busy, I think. She’s got one of those posh phones now - does everything. Has all her appointments in it and a camera and a radio. But she’ll be busy. I don’t want to bother her. Had enough of those calls myself, pain in the bloody arse. I don’t want to be a boil on the arse of life, if that’s the last thing I can be.”

  There were tears in her voice, and fear, even though her eyes stayed fierce. “Nope. I’ll leave all that crap to the home. I hope I shit myself while they’re cleaning me up. Dead bodies do that, you know. All our sins come out in the end, the body lets it all go, relaxes for once. You know, being so uptight makes you hold it all in, Peter, you should think about that, think about not being so constipated all the time. Are you listening to me?”