Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  Gillian McAllister

  * * *

  EVERYTHING BUT THE TRUTH

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1: WHO?

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part 2: WHAT?

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part 3: WHY?

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Reading Group Questions

  Acknowledgements

  Read More

  Follow Penguin

  To Dad.

  We said we would never leave each other.

  And now our ideas are forever in print together.

  Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

  H. Jackson Brown, Jr

  It ended with an accusation I never thought I’d make, thrown across the room at him like a grenade. And after the ending, there was the rest: the door slamming, waking alone with the knowledge of what I’d done, unable to stop replaying the look he gave me.

  But it began with love. That part was easy.

  I loved the way he was forever appearing in photographs on Facebook, caught self-consciously in the background at parties, like a grumpy meerkat looking towards the camera. I loved his hypochondria. How often he rang the doctor and said, ‘It’s me,’ in his embarrassed, Scottish way.

  I loved the person he was trying to be: a tidy, early person who occasionally threw out all of his clothes in the name of minimalism and then had to go and sheepishly buy more socks. I loved, too, the person he tried not to be: the man who was always late, tucking his T-shirt into his jeans as he waited at the train station, trying to flatten his hair that spiked up at the back when he didn’t have time to gel it. I loved the things he did without thinking: putting a hand out to stop his younger brother from crossing the road; using the last of the milk for my tea and not his. I loved the way he came home from the gym, intimidated by the ‘big men’.

  And I loved his body, of course. His small ears. The curved edges of his smile like pencil etchings on his face. How nice his forearms looked in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  And the rest. The tiny, insignificant things. That he couldn’t whistle.

  I loved his politics and his religious views – ‘I don’t believe in God, but I’m terrified of him’ – and the way he couldn’t sit still. I loved the way he was the only person still buying Wagon Wheels and I loved the way he dipped them in tea and called it breakfast.

  And I loved the way he looked at me. Heavy lidded. A special, dimpled smile. Just for me. I loved that more than anything. That look came before everything.

  Before the baby.

  And before the lies.

  Part 1

  * * *

  WHO?

  1

  Present day

  We were almost asleep. We were like one being then; our bodies as close as could be. But the flash lit up the room so brightly, grey turning to a blueish white, that I could see it even with my eyes closed.

  I sat up, the duvet falling away from my skin and leaving goosebumps in its wake. Jack’s house was always so cold. I tried to locate the source of the light. It was coming from the iPad resting on the bedside table.

  I don’t know why I looked. Perhaps I was actually already asleep, because I was unfurling from the covers, stretching out to pick it up, my naked torso ghoulishly reflected in the large windows, before I even really considered what I was doing.

  ITEM 1

  From: Charlie Masters

  To: Jack Ross

  Subject: Fwd: Douglas’s Atrocity Rears Its Head Again

  Hi, sorry to dredge up your history, but I thought you should see this … that you’d want to know.

  Charlie Masters. Charlie – I didn’t know him. I’d met only Jack’s family; not a single one of his friends.

  I paused, my finger poised over the email. One swipe and I could see it. I must have waited a second too long, because the iPad dimmed, and I replaced it on the table, the email and my mad moment almost forgotten.

  The Newcastle night outside was completely black. I knew the countryside was just beyond it, but I couldn’t see it.

  ‘Rachel. What you doing?’ Jack yawned. I loved that Scottish what; the soft rush of the pronounced ‘h’. Whotyadee’n? It was so deep, his voice. Strangers commented on it.

  He rolled over and switched the lamp on. His dark hair was all over the place, and as he sat upright and revealed his beard, and then his chest hair, I thought he looked a bit like a caveman.

  ‘Something lit up,’ I said.

  ‘Probably the cat doing stuff,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Maybe. He was in here,’ I lied. I looked at the room. He hadn’t decorated – not really; not in the way I wanted him to – but there was one thing on the wall. The only thing, against the exposed brickwork and the lack of curtains and lack of anything, was a grainy pregnancy scan, curling slightly at the edges.

  He saw me looking. ‘What’s Wally up to?’ he said.

  We called the baby Wally, because neither of us could see it on the scan. It had stuck.

  ‘Sleeping,’ I said with a smile.

  I drew the covers self-consciously up to my neck, imagining the lamplight showing the fat blue veins that had appeared almost overnight on my breasts, running across my skin like plant roots; covering up my pink and wilted nipples.

  Jack smiled back at me, then stood up and left the room. I watched his long body retreat down the hallway, his olive-toned skin catching the moonlight that filtered in through his windows. He walked duck-footed, which made my heart sing. My groin churned as his bum flexed, ready again even though we’d had sex just hours previously: the insatiable appetite of new lovers. He returned a few seconds later with a hot-water bottle in one hand and with Howard, his ginger cat, in the other.

  He’d started doing that recently. Making hot-water bottles. He’d seen me do it the other week and had wordlessly taken it on as his task. Every night, no matter whether we slept at my place or his, he brought a hot-water bottle up to me, handed it over with a smile.

  ‘Told you he was around,’ I said, gesturing to the cat.

  Howard turned and looked at me, his head upside down, his eyes surprised.

  ‘He’s a pain,’ Jack said, as Howard squirmed and jumped on to the bed.

  Jack was working temporarily in Newcastle for City Lights magazine. He’d moved down from Scotland, for a while. The first time I went to his house, I h
ad asked him why he had bought a cat. ‘A man living alone with just a cat for company?’ I had teased.

  ‘Every house needs a cat,’ he said. ‘Every single one. Anyone who disagrees is wrong.’

  Jack sat down next to Howard now, and looked at me, a half-smile curving his lips.

  I wondered when I’d stop feeling giddy when he looked at me like that. I was punch-drunk, could often be found smiling happily, deliriously, at myself in his bathroom mirror while I scrubbed my make-up off with his Nivea soap.

  ‘When will you get curtains?’ I said, instead of saying all that; feeling stupid with only my head poking out of the duvet.

  Jack considered my request seriously, though he no doubt didn’t care about curtains himself. ‘When we move. The neighbours have seen it all, anyway,’ he said with a raised eyebrow. It was one of our inside jokes, that. How much sex we had. How good at it we were. So good we made a baby. ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Nice ones. Thick ones,’ I said. ‘The light wakes me up.’

  ‘Consider it done.’ He pointed behind me. ‘Pass me that?’

  I blinked, then looked and pretended to notice his iPad for the first time; that I hadn’t just been holding it, my finger paused to open his email with a swipe. It felt hot in my hands as I passed it to him. He held it for a few moments, the screen blank.

  ‘Rugby season started Saturday,’ he said.

  I turned over and lay on my side, propped up on one elbow. Howard settled between my feet, not pleasingly warm and silky, like most cats, but fat and weighty, like a doorstop. ‘I’ve never known a rugby player,’ I said with a grin.

  ‘Not at school?’

  I gave a derisive snort. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Oh, I forgot you went to school in the Bronx,’ Jack said with a laugh, his hand disappearing underneath the duvet and resting on my hip. My whole left side immediately stood to attention, prickling; a Catherine wheel of fire spinning in my belly. I tried to concentrate, but it was almost impossible.

  ‘Just Newcastle’s finest,’ I said. ‘Not all of us can go to schools that have their own hymns and live-in staff. Tell me again what you used to have for lunch?’

  This was one of our favourite games, and I made Jack tell my friends and family about it all the time. He always managed to come up with another pretentious dish. He hung his head in mock shame. ‘Tiger prawns with pak choi?’ he said with a meek laugh. It was deep and low; more of an amused exhale. Like music.

  He covered his face with his hands. ‘For the record, I am sorry.’

  ‘Pak choi,’ I said with a hoot of laughter. ‘Pak choi.’

  ‘One simply cannot play lacrosse without being fuelled by a hearty lunch of pak choi,’ he said.

  ‘Our teachers had bullet-proof vests,’ I said.

  ‘They did not.’

  ‘Only for a term, after Jonny Steele brought a rifle in.’

  ‘Wow,’ he mouthed. He moved his hand to my thigh, fingers dancing lightly, as if he was playing the piano. His hand felt relaxed against my body, but the expression on his face was troubled, momentarily. ‘Anyway, you should come. One Saturday. Not to the match. That’s boring. But after. There’s drinks.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, a fresh zing of happiness working its way up my spine. From our brilliant beginning, spent gazing at each other in cafes, kissing outside restaurants, ignoring waiters because our heads were full of each other, to our shaky period, that shocking afternoon in front of the positive pregnancy test when we both barely knew what to say to each other, and now here we were on the cusp of autumn and I was going to his rugby club, like a proper girlfriend.

  ‘You mean I’ll actually be meeting people you know?’ I said.

  I was teasing, but Jack’s hand stopped moving across my skin, and he withdrew it.

  ‘If you want,’ he said. He was still looking at me. His eyes were crinkled at the corners.

  It had been nearly seven months, and I still hadn’t met his friends. I was three months pregnant, and Wally had grown from two cells, to four, to eight, to a tangerine-sized foetus. Now here we finally were. Better late than never.

  ‘There’s a clubhouse where everyone drinks, after. It is a bit raucous, though.’

  ‘Too much pak choi?’ I said.

  Jack laughed softly. ‘Mostly just misogyny. Ignore them.’

  ‘Oh good.’

  He smiled at me. It was only quick, brief, but genuine. I smiled back and we held each other’s gaze for a moment too long.

  He looked away first, and I watched the tip of his index finger blanch white as he pressed the ‘home’ button on his iPad. Something closed down in his expression. No, not closed down, exactly. Opened, then closed, like somebody intruding on two strangers in a back bedroom at a party, then closing the door again. His stubble-covered cheeks hollowed, then filled, as he swiped across the screen. And then he dismissed the notification. It was gone, deliberately unread, and he was opening his Kindle app and reading Austen again – he only ever seemed to read books by women, a fact which made me love him even more – his skin swarthy and tanned against the white pillows, his expression entirely neutral. I looked at his full, dark red lips for a second before turning over myself.

  I stared, eye level with the curtainless window, wondering about the look that had crossed Jack’s face. I could still see it in my mind; something came before that forced neutral expression. Didn’t it?

  ‘You get an email?’ I said. ‘I thought it lit up.’ I was still facing the window.

  ‘No, no,’ Jack said.

  And that was what did it, I suppose. That was the moment that everything sprang from.

  I said nothing in reply. What could I say? I was mistaken. It was spam. He’d forgotten, already. Or it was a work email. Just work. And he didn’t want to discuss work.

  ‘Look at that,’ Jack said to me a few seconds later.

  I turned back to face him. One of his pectoral muscles was twitching.

  ‘Palpitations,’ he said, his eyes sliding left and locking on to mine. His breath smelt of toothpaste and the coffee he’d finished ten minutes before bed. It was his evening routine. Coffee and chocolate, then bed; his way of eking out the last and best part of the night.

  ‘No – muscle fasciculation,’ I said sleepily. ‘Twitches. Too much caffeine. Or maybe you’re run-down.’ I laughed gently at this; another of our in-jokes.

  He’d been a political correspondent and court reporter, in Scotland, and then branched out into travel writing, which he much preferred. He would admit he could never be run-down. He got up at ten and did things only the self-employed could do in the morning: put washing on, made proper filter coffee, opened post. He finished work at four in the afternoon and watched Pointless with tea and biscuits.

  Where Ben, my ex-boyfriend and a teacher, would cagily refer to marking and long hours and parents’ evenings, Jack embraced his status as a slacker. ‘Yeah, I can take Wednesday afternoons off, if I like,’ he would say over dinner. ‘Best job in the world.’

  He wasn’t a slacker, though, not really. He’d spend weeks working until midnight, his beard gradually growing longer and longer and his sleep patterns more nocturnal. And then he’d produce a handful of beautiful articles, lovely prose, and revert back to his old routine.

  ‘Take a muscle relaxant, if you like,’ I said. ‘Buscopan.’

  ‘Will that work?’ he asked, sounding delighted.

  It was a classic anxious-type response. Textbook. He wanted a fix, a solution, and some reassurance from a doctor. But he was my classic anxious type.

  ‘Well, muscle twitches aren’t serious,’ I said. ‘But yes.’

  ‘I’m not about to shuffle off this mortal coil, then?’ he said, an arm snaking its way around my shoulders before lightly ruffling my hair.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You are a massive hypochondriac, though.’

  ‘I know. But it’s handy knowing a doc.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said quietly, and he sighed.

 
; We resumed our positions spooning in the bed, Howard settled between us like a small barge. Jack fell asleep immediately, but I didn’t; I never do.

  It happened again, like it always did, when I eventually slept. I dreamt of the boy in front of me, sitting on the floor, a nasal cannula tracking underneath his nose like a transparent worm. He reached towards me, but I waved my hands through his. He disappeared, as he always did, when I woke.

  2

  I kept idly thinking about the email. No, not the email. The look. And the lie; that little white lie. The first time I’d caught him lying to me about something, however small.

  I was at work, amongst the dusty law books, when I looked it up. I was supposed to be typing attendance notes. Audrey, my closest friend, had helped me to get a job typing for one of the partners at her firm. I hated it, of course, but he was a medical negligence lawyer, and I enjoyed reading the notes, was the only person who could decipher the doctors’ handwriting.

  I got out an English dictionary and searched for the definition.

  ITEM 2

  atrocity > noun (pl. atrocities) an extremely wicked and cruel act, typically one involving physical violence or injury.

  – SYNONYMS: act of barbarity, act of brutality, act of savagery, act of wickedness.

  I nodded, then closed the dictionary. It was just out of interest. Curiosity.

  3

  I awoke to a gentle shaking of my shoulder. It was a Saturday morning, the room a greyish blue. ‘Rach, Rach,’ Jack was saying.

  That deep voice, his hands on my skin, reminded me of the early days. Before the pregnancy. How he called me five minutes after our first date officially ended, said he wanted to cook a meal for me. When was I free? The next day, I replied. We played no games. I went over straight from the office, in my work clothes, my make-up fading; he was cooking chicken fajitas, barefoot in his kitchen. He introduced me to his cat. ‘I think you’ll get on,’ he said. After that, he kissed me, straight away, a full, deep kiss, standing in his hallway. Then he said, ‘I want to carry on, but Howard will eat the chicken.’