Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  We walked for a while in silence, Jack’s hand in mine. He always reached for me when we were walking. No matter where we were. In the cheese aisle in Tesco. Walking fewer than ten steps from our car to a restaurant. He always held my hand.

  Another couple was circling the loch, the opposite direction from us. An elderly couple.

  We passed them. The woman – in a purple fleece – stared at Jack, her vivid blue eyes looking bright and fixated. There was a strange expression on her face. Disbelief, maybe? But then I blinked and soon they were behind us.

  But then something happened. A few moments later, somebody shouted.

  The elderly woman had turned around and was yelling, but the breeze was carrying her words away from us. She was motioning in the direction of me and Jack. Instinctively, I started back towards her, but Jack put an arm out to stop me. His grip on my wrist was too firm. But it wasn’t only his grasp. It was other things. His body language, hunched over, as if bracing himself for a blow. His parents’ body language, too. They’d stopped, stock-still. Only Davey looked as I felt: confused, wanting to find out what was happening. He looked at me, very briefly. He didn’t often make eye contact. Cynthia reached out to stop him, just as Jack had done with me.

  Jack’s father, Tony, strode over to us. He’d been upbeat, pleased with his birthday presents, excited about the walk, but his entire demeanour had changed. His eyes were wide, his hands reaching towards us. ‘Why is she here?’ he said in a low voice to Jack.

  The couple were still standing about twenty feet away, still watching us. The woman had stopped yelling, but she was pushing her hair behind her ears, looking anguished.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ Jack said. ‘I don’t know where they live now. I didn’t know. There’s nobody here,’ he said, his eyes darting around the loch. ‘I thought it would be deserted.’

  I’d never seen Jack like that. He was desperate, that’s the only word I can think of to describe it. His hands were wringing and he kept looking at the woman.

  Her jacket blended with the heather. Her hair was stringing across her face, sticking, wet with rain. And then she seemed to decide something, and started back towards us. Almost running. Her long grey hair fanned out behind her as she stumbled across the grass and the heather. She kept losing her footing. I had been, too; it was spongy and unpredictable underfoot.

  Jack’s dad turned to him. He’d been in business his entire life – a whisky distillery – and I could see he was good in a crisis.

  ‘How did they know?’ he said.

  Jack’s eyes narrowed. He looked across at the woman still striding towards us. ‘I don’t think they did,’ he said. ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘Let’s get off the main bit,’ Tony said to Jack, indicating a section of the loch path that was slightly more worn than the rest.

  We walked unsteadily up the hill, turning away from the woman. I complied because I didn’t know what else to do. Someone would explain it soon. Surely?

  The woman stopped at the bottom of the slope we were climbing. Her husband was shouting at her, imploring her to leave us alone.

  I don’t think it was our moving up the hill that had put her off. No, she looked defeated in other ways, turning away from us, bringing the cuff of her fleece up to her mouth and sobbing into it.

  And then, before striding off, she turned and yelled just one sentence, sounding tinny and reedy in the wind and the rain. ‘How can you sleep at night?’ she said, her accent thick and Scottish.

  I couldn’t tell who it was directed at. It was hurled at all of us, standing in a group against the wind.

  She turned and walked away, and we made our way around the loch at a higher level, dodging wild animal droppings and feral plants whose firm stems tangled around our ankles.

  ‘What was that?’ I said to Jack in a low voice when she’d gone. I could still see her, in the distance, raking her hair back, shaking her head, bent against the wind.

  His parents both turned around and stared at me. There was a strange expression on their features, unless I was imagining it. Realization, I think it was.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Jack said tightly.

  ‘Who was she?’

  Jack looked up at his parents. ‘Just somebody who has a grudge against Dad.’

  I blinked. I couldn’t imagine belonging to such a family. Nobody would ever bear a grudge against my dad, with his penchant for unplugging every single electrical item before bed and tapping his weather barometer every morning.

  I caught a look that passed between Jack and his father. I didn’t know what it meant, but it seemed important.

  ‘I bought some land near her house. Paid a developer. Then put a factory on it,’ Tony said with an easy shrug. ‘Factory fumes. Unspoilt Scottish countryside. Protecting the greenbelt. That sort of thing. It went to court. It got ugly. Didn’t expect we’d ever see them again,’ he said. He waved a hand over to where she’d come from. The tone of it was condescending, as though he felt she was a crazy hippy or something. I didn’t think that at all, though. I couldn’t get the image of her out of my mind. Her anguish. The way she’d raked her hair back off her face. It looked like grief, to me. I’d seen enough of it.

  Cynthia was nodding vigorously. They all turned away from me then, and the wind and the rain were so fierce that it was impossible for me to ask any further questions. Only Davey continued to turn around and look at me. He was craning his neck, the vivid blue of his eyes catching the pale sunlight.

  It was much later when I realized Jack had left marks on my wrist. I only spotted them in the shower.

  ‘Did you know her, too?’ I said to Jack later, when we were alone.

  We were standing on the patio. The sun was setting beyond the pond. The moat, I teased, the first time I visited Jack, and he’d smiled sheepishly.

  ‘Who?’ Jack said, turning to me. He was drinking squash. His fingers left marks on the glass. He looked down. ‘God, this is amazing,’ he said. ‘Strawberry squash.’

  ‘The woman at the lake.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’

  I waited.

  He ran a hand through his hair. ‘We were all involved in the legal stuff. It was really horrible. Dad basically carved up her land. For his factory. It was – she was very emotional.’

  ‘With good reason,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. But we created loads of jobs. In a recession,’ Jack went on. ‘It was really awful, though. I felt bad for her.’

  ‘She recognized you.’

  ‘Yeah. During the whole case, she really appealed to me. She thought I was sympathetic. Which I was. It was traumatic, for everyone.’

  ‘It sounds it,’ I said.

  We lapsed into silence.

  ‘Is it just Ben?’ Jack said, looking sideways at me as he raised his glass to his lips.

  ‘Just Ben?’

  ‘Exes.’ His tone was conversational. I must have looked wary, though, because he added, ‘I just realized I’d never asked.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Basically. I didn’t have any real, proper boyfriends before him. We were young. You?’

  ‘Hardly anyone serious. Nothing like this.’

  ‘Like what?’ I said, even though I knew I was fishing for compliments. I expected him to trot out the baby line; to say that was what made us more serious than any previous relationship.

  But he didn’t. ‘Being in love,’ he said, his eyes on me.

  ‘You’ve never been in love before me?’ I asked, unable to stop smiling.

  ‘Not like this.’ He looked at the ground, scuffed his socked foot on the concrete slab. ‘You’re awesome.’

  The dogs padded outside into the chilled autumn sun.

  ‘Are you a dog person?’ I said, still smiling.

  ‘Not really, no. We always had cats. I wanted more cats. They caught the rats for us, too.’

  ‘Why the change?’ I said, fingering Mozart’s silky ear between my finger and thumb. I wondered idly if Wally would like doing
that, when he was one, maybe. Or two.

  ‘We … I don’t know. We just got the dogs. A few years ago. For no reason.’ He spoke quickly.

  It was as though, for once, rather than keeping information back, he had told me too much.

  We all stayed up too late. It was no issue for me; I’d given up trying to sleep entirely. My body felt squashed in bed, and I woke up almost every hour.

  Even Davey stayed downstairs with us. He abandoned his mission for the night, though he was mostly silent. Nobody mentioned the elderly woman from the loch.

  I came last at Trivial Pursuit. I wished Kate was there to laugh at me, rather than look aghast when I didn’t know when the last Spanish election was. We had such poor general knowledge, Kate and I. I once confessed I couldn’t point to Iraq on a map and she told me she didn’t actually know how the sun came to rise.

  Jack was amused, but I think embarrassed, too, because he shoehorned in the fact that I’d been a doctor.

  ‘What kind?’ Tony said. He was wearing reading glasses, and he looked over them at me.

  He was hard-looking, in some ways. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out he’d been a diplomat or a politician. He looked so serious and powerful. Greying hair and grooves in his forehead where he frowned. No laughter lines. He looked nothing like Jack.

  ‘Paediatrics,’ I said.

  ‘And what are you now?’

  I paused. Cynthia had lit candles and they were flickering around us, the light changing as they moved.

  What was I? A woman, a girlfriend, a daughter, a sister, a friend. ‘Nothing medical,’ I settled for.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Fair enough.’ It was repeated more slowly that time, as he fished around in the clear plastic bag for the winning piece of pie. Audrey and I had nicknamed Jack’s dad the silverback, though she’d never met him. He had to be in control, to be moving the conversation forward. ‘NHS too troubled?’ he said to me.

  This was my party line. The long hours. The ever-increasing litigation. The antisocial shift patterns. The constant pressure. But, actually, not one of those things had ever bothered me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t enjoyable any more.’

  I wanted to add everything else that had gone into me quitting. The events of that strange, chilly winter. The perfect storm. But I didn’t. I couldn’t possibly talk about my mother’s death during a casual games night. To explain how I felt when I saw two parents, sharing the load, making tea.

  The pangs of nostalgia. Let alone the rest.

  Later, everyone had gone upstairs. I was getting my phone out of my handbag in the hallway. I liked to take it up to bed, to use the Wi-Fi and look at Facebook, to WhatsApp Kate back – she’d messaged, saying: how are the bonnie Highlands? – and Instagram my cosy feet in the bed with Jack. It was what made me happy, late at night, with him.

  Davey was still in the living room at the end of the hallway. He liked to blow the candles out. It was one of his things.

  The living room was still lit, amber, as he moved around, and I could see his shadow projected against the far wall. His hair was moving as he leant down to blow another flame out. He had huge, unruly hair. He raked his fingers through it so much that it was almost always standing on end. I could only really see his outline in the darkness, black against the orange backdrop, but I saw him raise his arm, then a shadow of movement.

  I kept looking, and he did it again. He was beckoning to me.

  I walked along the hallway and down the three steps into the living room. Only two candles remained lit. One tall church candle sitting on the mantelpiece, and a tea light in a lantern on the window sill. The room was almost in complete darkness. Davey was standing in the centre. He was tall, like Jack, but lanky, not broad.

  He was still beckoning to me to come closer. I inched slowly towards him in the darkness.

  ‘You don’t know, do you?’ he said. His eyes were downcast, looking at the dusty red rug.

  I was clutching my phone, and I pressed the ‘home’ button so it lit up the living room and I could look at him carefully. It changed his face from a burnished, candlelit orange to a spooky, light blue-green. A portrait hung on the wall behind him, above the mantelpiece. An ancestor. A past Ross. They came from old money. A whisky distillery started in Victorian times, passed down and grown through the generations.

  ‘Know what?’ I said to Davey, trying not to look at the creepy portrait behind him, its face so like Jack’s. The heavy brow. The serious eyes. The broad shoulders.

  Davey’s eyes were downcast. He rarely looked at anybody, but especially not at that moment.

  ‘What happened,’ he said. ‘To upset that woman.’

  ‘The woman at the loch?’

  I was looking at him, imploring him to look up at me. It was the most coherent I had ever known him be.

  He ignored me. He strode suddenly across the room and blew out the candle on the mantelpiece. My phone’s light went out, and the darkness rushed in, the only illumination coming from the tea light on the sill, reflected in the window so that there were two tiny flames, darting unpredictably in the night.

  ‘What happened?’ I said.

  Davey ignored me. He blew out the final candle. Everything went black.

  ‘About the death,’ he said. ‘About what … Jack planned.’

  He left the room as soon as he’d said it. I called after him softly, but he didn’t stop. I heard his feet on the stairs and the squeak of his door handle, and I was alone.

  I raced up to Jack’s bedroom as if I was being chased. Davey’s door was closed; the sound of explosions came from within. Jack was in bed, sitting up, with How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran in his hands.

  ‘Davey just said something.’

  Jack folded a page down, but didn’t look concerned. ‘Yeah?’ he said, starting to close the book.

  ‘About that woman.’

  ‘What woman?’ Jack said, though he was blushing, the tips of his ears turning pink.

  ‘He said that woman was shouting because of what happened. Because somebody died. And then he said …’ I paused. ‘That you had a plan.’ I paraphrased it deliberately.

  Jack’s hands stilled. The book stayed half open in them. He was staring at me. ‘God,’ he said. ‘Sorry. He used to scare guests sometimes. My friends.’

  ‘What did he … what did he mean?’

  ‘He meant nothing, Rach. He doesn’t know … he doesn’t know what he’s saying. He doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. I thought back. It was true that Davey had looked vague. Besides, how often was he lucid? Hardly ever.

  I got undressed and slipped into bed. Jack spooned me into him, as he always did, and I reached my hand out into the cold to turn off the light.

  I closed my eyes, pretending to sleep. After a few minutes, Jack’s breathing became even and heavy. Beyond us there was no noise at all. Nothing. No distant road sounds. No neighbours. The silence seemed heavy against my ears.

  And then I heard something. A scream. A fox. It sounded like a child’s cry in the night.

  I knew I’d have to visit Davey in his room to ask him what he had meant. I couldn’t resist probing, and it was the only way to see him. He only came out when something was arranged.

  So the next morning, I went upstairs on the pretence of pregnancy sickness, but stopped just outside Davey’s bedroom.

  I could hear explosions from within. Spaceship sounds. His guffaws. I knocked on the door and pushed it open slowly. It was dark. The curtains were closed.

  He didn’t look up at all. Didn’t move. Didn’t acknowledge me.

  ‘Davey,’ I said, looking over my shoulder quickly. ‘Davey.’

  He ignored me. I winced, standing a few feet away from him, my arms across my body self-consciously. His room was huge, and full of things. His different obsessions. Space. Computer games. There were photographs, magazine clippings, all over the walls.

  He must have finished somethin
g, because his games console went quiet and he moved his gaze. He wasn’t quite looking at me, but he was no longer looking at the screen, either. He was wearing tracksuit bottoms, a T-shirt and no socks. I’d not seen him so casual before.

  ‘I wanted to know … when you and I were downstairs last night … what did you mean?’ I stammered on my words.

  He didn’t say anything, and I advanced slightly further into the room. ‘Sorry, Davey – but when you said about what Jack planned? What did you mean?’ I kept my voice low, tried to speak quickly. I’d just find out, then I’d leave again.

  As soon as I said Jack’s name, Davey’s head turned quickly towards me. His eyes locked on to mine for the briefest of seconds. And then he whispered, ‘I’m in trouble.’

  ‘No, Davey, no. You’re not in trouble.’

  ‘Trouble,’ he whispered again. And then he stood up, his hands over his ears, and shouted, ‘I can’t play if I get in trouble any more.’

  ‘No, I just wanted –’

  ‘Trouble,’ Davey yelled. He strode across his room and covered his games console with his hands.

  And then I heard an icy cold voice behind me. ‘What are you doing?’

  I turned. It was Jack.

  ‘Oh, I just – I was just paying a visit,’ I gabbled.

  Jack was holding an orange drink. He gestured to it. ‘For your morning sickness. Vitamins.’ His face was furious. ‘Why are you in here?’

  He walked over to Davey and knelt down, trying to catch his eye. ‘You’re not in trouble, mate,’ he said softly. ‘No trouble at all. None whatsoever.’

  Davey nodded quickly, seeming appeased, and sat back down on his bed. I backed out of the room slowly, walking down the hall to Jack’s room, my cheeks burning.

  Jack arrived after a few minutes. He didn’t say anything, just opened the door and held his hands out, palms up, as if to say: so?

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just –’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ he cut me off. ‘You can’t go and just chat to him. Go into his space. He can’t … it’s not cool with him.’