Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  I tried to fill the silence. ‘I don’t know, I …’

  ‘Jack – when you move back up,’ his mum said, coming into the room, holding a stack of books, ‘can you take these? They’re just sitting here.’

  She was wearing an actual twinset. I’d never seen anybody wear those outside of American 1950s sitcoms.

  I stopped speaking when she entered, as I always did. She ignored me, as she always did. She had accepted a scan photo, but nothing more. She didn’t know whether I had brothers and sisters, where I’d gone to university. Nothing. She always wore the exact same shade of pink lipstick. Once, I’d seen her in the morning without it, and she’d looked almost ghostly.

  ‘Well, we don’t know what our plans are,’ Jack said.

  ‘We both live in Newcastle,’ I said, unable to help myself. I watched his mother wince at my pronunciation: they all said New-castle. Everybody native knew it was New-castle.

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said.

  I looked at Jack again. He was placidly cutting the toastie, his gaze trained down towards the counter, but I knew – from what little I knew about him – that his mind would be whirring with what his mother had just said.

  Three days after we met, I was Facebook stalking him. Who wasn’t partial to a bit of Internet stalking? We all did it. I dived into Facebook – and then Google, though the only things that came up were his articles, and charity stuff he’d done – ready to explore the likes and photos of a man whose lips had kissed mine for the first time on the Tyne Bridge two days previously.

  Jack’s Facebook page was almost completely locked down, and it was too early for a friend request, but I could click on his friends. And so it was Jack’s mum’s profile I ended up scrutinizing, fascinated in the aftermath of my own mum’s death. I had made my mind up about her, there and then.

  Jack looked up at her now. ‘I don’t think Rach really wants to move up here,’ he said.

  ‘But don’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘Not if she doesn’t,’ he replied, glancing quickly over at me. He didn’t mention my mum, and I was glad of that.

  As she left, I turned to Jack, keeping my expression expectant. He wasn’t looking at me, and eventually, I said, ‘Are we finished? About Douglas?’

  ‘What do you want to know? Ask me anything.’

  The combination of his expression and his willingness to talk extinguished my anxiety, as if I’d blown out a candle. The email was about his friend. It was such a non-event, he hadn’t even answered me when I probed. It was nothing. Nothing.

  But, as was always the way, another anxiety had been lit in its place: Oban.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘So what about your mum? Why does she think …? I can’t move. My dad. It’s all so recent.’

  ‘I know.’ He leant over and opened the window.

  The misty countryside air floated in. It looked spooky outside, a spider’s web across the window lit up by the security lights, strung with raindrops from the evening shower. A proper autumn.

  I remembered the first time I’d told him about my mum. I’d told him things in parts. Piecemeal. About Ben first, and then about Mum. I didn’t want him to run a mile, thinking I had issues. Unresolved, recent things. He’d listened intently, his eyes on mine.

  The second time we’d spoken about her, I’d cried as I told him the kernel of truth at the heart of all of it: that I hadn’t always liked her. That, once, she’d shouted at Kate for not winning a tennis match, when Kate was trying to turn professional. That she’d told me not to do paediatrics because it wasn’t prestigious enough. That she constantly belittled Dad and we found it embarrassing. That, after she died, he’d uncovered an affair, with their mutual friend. That it had changed everything. Their past. Our future. One truth, and everything fractured around it.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Jack had said. ‘She was your mum and you loved her and she died. And she’d been unfaithful and she wasn’t always nice to you.’ He’d held his hands out like weighing scales.

  I could see it, then, for the first time. Both sides could be correct. The truth was complicated. I could love her and miss her and not miss her, all at the same time.

  Now, in his Oban kitchen, Jack gave me a small smile. ‘Let’s let Wally choose. It bloody stinks of burnt toast in here.’ He took a huge bite of the toastie, then proffered it to me. I took a mouthful, ravenous for it even though it had smelt so horrible just a few minutes ago. He held the toastie carefully, scooped a string of cheese from my chin, licking his finger.

  And then he said, as cool as anything, ‘Why were you looking at my emails?’

  I stuttered, couldn’t answer him, and he dropped the subject.

  Later, in bed, the email about Matt Douglas forgotten, my bump was itching. It was still tiny, but starting to feel tight, the skin stretched strangely. I wasn’t sleeping well.

  I was thinking about Oban. I knew nothing about being Scottish. I didn’t understand what the SNP stood for and I’d never been to the Edinburgh Fringe and I liked the bluebird spring days in Newcastle and the sunset over the Tyne Bridge and the lilt of the local accent.

  But then, I thought, as I listened to the Oban night, I could learn to love it in my own way. The perpetual autumnal feeling. The cosiness. The tartan gift shops and the funny blue five-pound notes. The quiet of Oban. I listened out for it. No cars. No aeroplanes. An occasional owl hooting.

  And that’s when I heard it. A snap. Like a loud staple gun going off. Like a knife being sharpened. I sat up in alarm, and Jack’s hand reached for mine, in his sleep, unconsciously.

  And, as I sat there listening intently, the duvet falling around my waist, I heard another.

  It was the traps.

  Downstairs, the rats were dying.

  8

  On Monday evening we arrived back at Jack’s temporary house in Newcastle. His parents had bought it for him when he got the contract with City Lights and needed somewhere near the city centre to live for a few months. It was only temporary, but they would let it out, they said, when he was finished. They had so much money, it wouldn’t matter if nobody wanted to rent it. They’d buy one for us in Oban, too, they said. They’d provide the capital, if only we’d move up. That part was tempting; a real house, and not a flat whose walls rattled when lorries drove past.

  We were standing in his kitchen. Audrey was coming to collect me in five minutes for our cinema ritual, put in place after Mum died. To give me something to do other than miss her phone calls. We saw anything; whatever was on. And each film we saw – and each ice-cream pot consumed – added another in-joke to our repertoire. We had jokes about the Toy Story films and Mad Max and about a random, indie film we’d seen about aliens. Everything.

  ‘I sleep so much better in Oban,’ Jack said. He was mentioning it more and more, at that time. Almost every day. Oban. Moving.

  ‘Apart from the rats,’ I replied.

  Jack had disposed of them wordlessly that morning. I hadn’t seen any bodies.

  ‘It’s Howard that wakes you, not Newcastle,’ I added.

  Howard was obsessed with Jack. He waited for him to wake up at 8 a.m. every day, eventually meowing loudly if he didn’t get up.

  ‘Were you staring at the automatic cat feeder all weekend?’ Jack called through to the living room, where Howard was asleep on the sofa. Jack smiled, then got a glass out of the cupboard and filled it from the tap.

  ‘You missed him,’ I said. I placed a hand on Jack’s arm.

  ‘I either miss him or you. Unless you’re both with me. In my bed.’

  ‘Howard. Your other lover.’

  ‘We could live anywhere round here. Together.’

  ‘Maybe … just …’ I couldn’t explain my hesitation. It was everything I wanted. I’d met his friends, his family. He was letting me in. I should have been happy.

  Jack’s home line rang. He glanced at the number on the black handset standing on the kitchen counter, then looked back at me.

  ‘Leave it
, I think,’ Jack said, more to himself than to me.

  The answer machine clicked on. I’d never had an answer machine. Coming in and checking for messages always felt so Sex and the City to me: ‘Jack here. I’m not around. Please leave me and Howard a message.’

  I smiled at that, but then we heard the message. A deep breath. Jack’s mum’s voice.

  ‘Hi. I just –’

  Jack sprang to life. He was pressing buttons on the handset, but his mother was still speaking.

  ‘– wanted you to …’

  Finally, he pressed ‘answer’, even though the speakerphone was still on. ‘Hi, I’m just with Rachel,’ he said. His words were rushed. ‘Hanging out,’ he added, though we weren’t. I was about to leave. We were standing in the kitchen, drinking water. Hardly hanging out.

  I frowned, looking at him. Was it my imagination, or … no. It was normal to say who you were with. Or, at least, not abnormal. Wasn’t it? Stop it, Rachel, you awful person, I said to myself. Ben had never cheated on me. Jack hadn’t done anything. It was all in my head. Kate would agree. She told Dad she was concerned about me after Ben and I broke up. He passed it on, in his diplomatic way. I’d ignored it, but I hadn’t forgotten. Concerned. Such a strange, loaded choice of word.

  ‘Great, Jack. Glad you’re home okay,’ she said.

  ‘Yep,’ he said. He finally got the phone off speaker and ended the call.

  ‘Just checking we got home alright,’ he said over his shoulder to me as he walked into the living room and sat down next to Howard.

  I stared after him. There was a wide archway between the kitchen and living room and he was in full view.

  It was things like this that made me not want to live with him. Silly things. But things that stood to attention in my gut and said look at this. A feeling that opened emails in the night and analysed looks exchanged in rugby clubs.

  I used to get that gut feeling all the time; I based an entire career on it. I would include it as evidence in my working day. The test results. The scans. And my gut feeling. They would tessellate together comfortably. I thought back to baby Grace.

  ‘Her bloods are good,’ the F1 junior doctor Natalie said to me a year ago. She had a grease stain on the left leg of her blue scrubs. We’d been eating toast, before we were called to look at a baby girl’s test results, and a drip of butter had pooled there. She wasn’t supposed to be assisting with neonates, but we were short-staffed. It was August and she was fresh out of med school. Her skin was grey with stress, her lips cracked. I caught her eye and smiled.

  ‘You won’t always feel like this,’ I said to her as I inserted the needle into Grace’s heel, found a vein and drew the blood out. ‘I’m repeating the bloods,’ I said. ‘She’s not alright.’

  ‘Isn’t she?’ Natalie said. ‘And thanks. It’s not what I imagined. Being a doctor.’ A strand of her long red hair fell out of her bun as she looked back down at the blood results, scanning for an anomaly, something she’d missed.

  She’d have breezed through med school. No resits, I was sure. And then she was there, with me. And it wasn’t easy any more. That she had a job where she might push a door open and come across a patient being intubated before she’d had her morning coffee would surely have shocked her. How could she ever go home and eat dinner, drink a glass of wine, relax, after seeing all this? Like returning from war. I knew, because I’d felt the same too, once. Time and experience had anaesthetized me to it all. But then the numbness wore off, for me.

  ‘Look,’ I said.

  Natalie scanned the papers furiously.

  ‘No,’ I said. I placed my fingertips on her arm. She was still freckled from her summer holiday. ‘Look at her.’

  And she did. The baby was grey, tiny specks of sweat on her upper lip. Her skin was the colour of a winter’s sky. Babies shouldn’t sweat. And they shouldn’t be that colour.

  ‘She’s sick,’ I said.

  It was the kind of sticky August day outside where everything felt reversed: inside was cold and outside was warm, even at night, and my upper lip was sweating, too. Those hazy days and nights were so surreal. I had breakfast when I got home and went straight to sleep, then dinner when I woke up. The other way round felt wrong, too: dinner when I got in and breakfast in the evening. I never slept enough. Ben’s dogs would keep me up.

  Grace’s second bloods came back: she was in the early stages of sepsis. I had been right. And that was the feeling, the feeling I had trusted for years and years. That month, Mum got sick, and died in the October. I didn’t spot it. No doctor would have: pancreatic cancer is almost asymptomatic. And yet. Shouldn’t I have seen it? Shouldn’t some instinct have told me about my own mother? I laid a hand across my stomach now and vowed to be in tune with Wally; to notice things. To act on them.

  I looked at Jack in the living room, as I stood on my own in his kitchen.

  ‘It’s a bit unreal, isn’t it?’ Jack called out, his voice low and sexy.

  I tried not to let that sway me. Not to let it mask the feeling of unease I held with me in his house.

  Howard was kneading the soft material of Jack’s jumper. Jack was holding his phone and I saw how it lit up his face.

  ‘Unreal?’ I prompted him.

  ‘How happy we are.’

  We talked often about our happiness, how lucky we were, how weird it was that we both loved to eat glacé cherries out of the pot and hated The One Show.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, unable to stop a small smile. I could feel myself being swayed, persuaded away from the darkness of that feeling and into the light.

  He patted the sofa next to him and I went to him. He was looking at his phone – I saw Facebook Messenger open – and he quickly exited it. And that was it, I suppose. The gut feeling, so nebulous, became a concrete action. I only waited a few seconds before asking.

  ‘What’s in there?’ I said.

  ‘In where?’ Jack turned to me.

  ‘In those messages.’

  ‘What messages?’

  ‘Facebook Messenger. You had it open. And then, when I came within reading distance you – you shut it.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Jack said.

  I was still sitting next to him, so close I could smell his deodorant, his washing powder. He smelt amazing, but it felt strange to be so close when the conversation had turned this way, like sitting stubbornly on a sun lounger even though it had started raining.

  ‘You shut your messages,’ I said. And then, like somebody in a soap opera, I held my palm out.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Jack said, his eyes darting from my hand to my face and back again.

  ‘I want to see those messages.’

  ‘I don’t want you to,’ he said. He shifted then, his body moving just slightly away from mine.

  ‘Do you have something to hide?’ I questioned, the things I’d been curious about adding up to more than the sum of their parts: the atrocity email, the JD nickname.

  ‘No,’ he said, looking straight at me. ‘But I don’t want my girlfriend to check my messages.’

  ‘I need to see those messages,’ I said, my tone urgent.

  The past few weeks’ worries had erupted like a volcano. It was then or never.

  Jack picked his phone up where it lay, face down, on the sofa. He opened Facebook Messenger and angled it towards me. Seven messages were showing on the screen. I scanned them. A rugby season round robin. His mum saying thanks for coming. A mate sending a gif of a writer at a typewriter. It went on and on. Nothing. Nothing sinister. Nothing worrying. No women sending him a row of kisses. Nobody sending ominous articles they thought he should see. Nothing.

  The relief was huge. Like an injection of happiness. It was nothing. He had shown me.

  ‘God,’ I said, closing my eyes. ‘I’m so sorry. I …’

  He shifted again, looking at me. His expression was attentive. He was nicer than Ben – a nicer person. He wasn’t defensive or unkind, merely interested. His eyes were running all over my face
, a hand to his chin.

  ‘You remember Ben,’ I started. ‘Right after I quit my job, I … I don’t know. I started accusing him of things. Cheating. He never did. It was awful, the things I accused him of. Once, he took some spare boxers to the gym and I said it was because he was shagging someone there. It was …’ I glanced at Jack, to check he was still listening. ‘It was just … mad. I was certifiable.’ I gave a tiny laugh.

  ‘I see.’ Jack’s voice was quiet. ‘Do you think it was about your mum?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. Yeah. It must have been. Or not doing medicine. The perfect storm. Feeling like I couldn’t trust people … and not having anything to investigate.’ I paused, feeling my eyes starting to prickle. ‘So, I’m sorry. I love you more than I ever loved him and …’

  Jack put his hand on my knee. He did it casually, like it was his own knee. ‘Shh,’ he said. His eyes met mine again. ‘I will never, ever cheat on you,’ he said. And then he lifted three fingers up. ‘A Brownie salute,’ he added.

  I giggled. ‘Were you a Brownie?’

  ‘No. I was a manly Cub Scout.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you – for telling me of your madness,’ he said. ‘I thought I was the only one.’

  I especially loved that about him; that he understood and tolerated neuroticism. I shifted closer to him. Instinctively, he lifted an arm to let me in, close to his chest.

  ‘Can I tell you another thing?’ I said. I was trying to cross the bridge, to get to know him. I didn’t know how to get to know somebody faster. It felt urgent, my need to know him well, before Wally came. So I wanted to tell him one of my earliest memories.

  ‘You are more than welcome to tell me another thing,’ he said.

  He was always happy to hear about me. He never nodded quickly, like Ben, urging me to get to the end of the story. He never said yes, you’ve told me or I think you’re overanalysing it.

  ‘When I was about five I used to think everyone with a big stomach was having a baby.’ I could feel his body shaking slightly with laughter, Howard jiggling up and down.