‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I know.’
He placed the drink on the chest of drawers and said nothing more. I looked up at him from my position on the bed. He hadn’t heard. I exhaled slowly through my nose. He didn’t know what I’d been asking him. That I’d been snooping. I lay down on the bed, saying nothing more.
I mustn’t do that again.
11
I listened to the tick of the clock on the wall, the soft whir of my computer as it started up. I finished the letter I’d begun late in the afternoon yesterday and put it on my managing partner’s chair. He hated that, but he forgot things otherwise, and they became buried in the books and court papers and correspondence that constantly littered his desk. It wouldn’t have been tolerated in hospital, that kind of disorganization.
‘Rachel,’ he said, striding in.
His name was Paul, but he liked me to call him Mr Grint. I jumped. I’d been listening to a medical podcast through my headphones and felt guilty, even though it was still before nine. He glanced dismissively at me before picking up the letter and reading through it.
‘No, no,’ he said, holding it up and coming over to me. ‘I dictated hyperglycaemic.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You’ve written hypo – please sort it.’
I scanned the letter: The Claimant suffers from ongoing episodes of hypoglycaemia and has to keep a chocolate bar on her at all times.
I looked across at Paul. He was scrolling through his phone, sighing impatiently as his ancient computer sprang to life. He never switched it off, because he said it took too long to start up. He wiggled the mouse and exhaled loudly again.
I stared back down at the letter. It was definitely correct. I stood up, my feet feeling uncomfortable in my heels, then sat down again. No, Paul was wrong – I stood up again – and I should tell him.
‘It’s hypo,’ I said, walking over to him and trying to find a spot for the letter on his desk. ‘Hypo means below.’
‘No. That’s hyper.’
I stared at him.
‘A hypochondriac,’ he said to me, ‘is somebody who’s concerned about their health – overly concerned. Hypo. Too much.’
‘Hypo means below and chondria means the stomach. Hypochondria refers to the anxious feeling you get in the pit of your stomach. Hypo blood pressure is too low and hyper – as in hyperactive – is too high. I promise it’s hypo,’ I said. I tried to make an apologetic face. I was out of line, of course I was, but at least he wouldn’t look like an idiot to anybody but me.
‘Right, right,’ he said, blinking. His eyebrows were black, with fine white lines threaded through them. ‘You’ve got a medical background, right?’
‘Right,’ I said, as if medical background could sum up all those years: the mornings feeling the stomach acid slosh around my belly on the way to the hardest exams I’d ever sat; nightshifts in Preston because it was apparently in the Manchester deanery; the births and the deaths, and the laughs over toast in the kitchen.
‘Nursing, was it?’ he said.
I chose not to answer. The less said, the better.
He passed the letter back to me. He hadn’t signed it.
I frowned.
‘My reference is incorrect,’ he said. ‘It’s PG1. There’s another PG here.’
I resisted rolling my eyes. Did it really matter?
‘Redo it, please,’ he said crisply, then typed something into his timesheet.
We went to the Hoppings that evening. It was a fairground on the Town Moor. It came late that year, mid-October, but the sun was hot and shining; an eerie displaced summer’s day in the autumn.
Kate and I had been to the fair every autumn as children. I could remember Mum, one year, proffering me some pink candy floss on a stick. Kate had been obsessed with the toffee apples – one of her early obsessions – and had tried to make them, disastrously, when she was fourteen.
We arrived late, as the sun was setting, orange slanting beams travelling across the grass. We had spent the early evening after work in the bath together; one of our favourite places to be. Jack was reading a police procedural. He read them voraciously. I could smell that old-book smell as the steam heated it. I read a magazine to him, and we laughed at the advice columns and the incorrect medical recommendations.
‘This book is irritating,’ he had said. ‘The interviewing officer can’t be the investigating officer.’ He huffed and put the book down by the side of the bath, its spine creaking as he did so.
It wasn’t that sentence that made me start and look at him; it was the one which followed.
‘I know because of all the court reporting,’ he said quickly. ‘Outside Oban. Petty thefts.’ It was the pace of it. It seemed, somehow, that the sentence had been preceded by a bundle of rushed, panicked thoughts.
I was still thinking about what he’d said when, at the Hoppings, he turned to me and said, ‘That doesn’t look safe,’ pointing upwards.
A fairground ride loomed above us. Chairs were suspended on the end of metal sticks, whirling around a central pole. As the ride slowed to a stop they drifted back to the centre, then out again as it sped up, like an umbrella being opened and closed.
‘I’m sure it’s been tested,’ I said.
‘Hmm.’ Jack’s brow creased as he studied it. The chairs began their descent again, and he flinched.
‘I never saw anybody admitted to A&E due to fairground rides,’ I said.
‘No?’
‘Never,’ I smiled.
His eyes met mine. We stared at each other for too long, standing there in the sun. We were always doing that. Our mouths had stopped speaking but our eyes hadn’t.
A stall owner held a ball out to us. His skin was burnished brown from the long, dry summer we’d had. He was ageless; somewhere between twenty-five and fifty. Jack sidestepped him, waving a dismissive hand, but grabbed my wrist lightly with the other. He glanced back, over his shoulder, twice.
‘So you don’t want to go on rides or throw balls at coconuts?’ I said.
It was common, though, this retiring behaviour. He was shy, would leave a shop if somebody spoke to him.
Jack looked across the fields, the grass vibrant after all the rain. ‘Let’s just walk,’ he murmured. ‘It’s my favourite thing to do. Just wander around with you.’ He reached for my hand.
I took a selfie of us. Jack pulled a horrendous face, poking his bottom lip out.
‘You wonder why you always turn up on Facebook tags looking like an idiot,’ I said, zooming in on the photograph and holding it up.
‘I can’t help it. It’s like my face transforms into an ogre’s. Look,’ he said, pulling his phone out and opening Facebook. He used it a lot. He liked to post wordy updates. He shared feminist articles occasionally, which I loved. He was often tagging me in articles about couples; the secrets of long-lasting marriages, the hidden psychology behind sleeping positions. He was so very public, so open, about us. So proud.
He passed me his phone and pointed to a photograph of him. I’d already seen it, earlier that day, but didn’t say. I liked checking his social media, reading all of his most interesting thoughts. He was with two other City Lights writers. They were both smiling normally. Jack looked hunched, and he was grimacing. He took his phone back as soon as I’d looked, plucking it from my hands.
‘What a catch. Look at me, though. A balloon,’ I said. Even my hands were fatter, I was sure of it. My boobs definitely were; they were climbing up cup sizes at an alarming rate.
‘You’re gorgeous. Blooming. Can you send me on a smiling course? Before Wally comes?’
‘I love your smile,’ I said to him. ‘You are lovely.’
Two women were sitting cross-legged in front of us, playing with a giant Jenga tower on the grass. They were sitting on their jumpers. The sky was a lavender colour as the sun set, and I shivered as a warm breeze moved across the exposed skin on my shoulders. This could be the last warm day of the year, I thought, as I watc
hed a teenager stride past us in tiny denim shorts. And then, the autumn and winter. I used to be obsessed with the seasons, when I was in school, always knowing what time it would get dark and when the days would start lengthening again. But then med school happened and then junior doctoring, when my days and nights seemed always inverted. And now here I was, barely even half aware what month it was.
‘Miss – bet you’ve got a right good aim,’ somebody called out to us as we passed their stall. His accent was somewhere between Irish and Geordie; the ‘r’s harsh but the vowels lilting.
Jack jumped. Well, not jumped exactly. Started.
‘Oh, I really haven’t,’ I said with a laugh, remembering netball games in school where teammates tried to stop me getting hold of the ball.
‘You can’t even get your socks in the washing basket,’ Jack said with a sly smile towards me.
‘It’s shooting, though,’ I said, ‘not throwing. Look.’
‘Ah,’ Jack said, stopping and glancing at the stall. ‘No way.’
He appraised the stand. He looked outdoorsy, posh, in his khaki top, his sunglasses pushed back into his hair.
‘I want a go,’ I said to him.
‘No way,’ he echoed, a hard edge to his voice.
I looked at him then. His face was pale. Grey pallor, we called it at work. A very specific shade.
‘Are you alright?’ I asked him, my eyes running over the beads of sweat on his upper lip that he self-consciously wiped away.
‘Yeah, I just don’t like guns,’ he said.
‘A person with anxiety who doesn’t like guns: you’re hardly the first,’ I said with a little laugh.
‘Maybe not.’
‘Why don’t you like them?’
He paused then. It was infinitesimal. I only noticed his hesitation because I was watching closely.
‘Because they’re dangerous,’ he said, after a few moments.
‘Not those little pellet guns,’ I said, to which he said nothing. ‘Have you ever used one?’
‘Yeah – clay pigeons. I’m posh, aren’t I?’ He gave a self-deprecating shrug.
‘Oh yes, of course. I forgot you people go shooting with Mallory and the dogs.’
‘Mallory? Who’s Mallory?’ he asked. His mouth was open but the edges were turned up, a tableau of a laugh.
‘Somebody generically posh.’
‘Of course. I had a target practice tree. I could hit it from anywhere in the garden by the end of uni.’
‘But now you’re afraid.’
‘Yeah. Well. Practising on that tree was a mistake.’ His tone was dark, as bitter and black as tar.
‘What? Why?’
‘It used to scare Davey,’ he said curtly.
‘But why was it a mistake?’
Jack didn’t answer. He was still eyeing the stall, though he had more colour in his cheeks. I frowned. He wasn’t making any sense.
‘What changed?’ I prodded again. ‘To make you anxious?’
His arm came around my shoulders, his fingers rubbing my bare skin. Immediately, goosebumps appeared all over my body, and I hoped he wouldn’t notice.
‘I don’t know. Life. Anyway. Choose another stall. What shall we try to win? You want a big cuddly toy and a fish in a bag?’ he said, turning his head to look at me.
‘No, I just want you,’ I said, feeling bold.
It should have been romantic, but he pulled his Facebook photograph face. Stooped over, a sneer across his features.
‘You want this?’ he said, still grimacing.
‘Yes,’ I said.
We left the fairground later, without looking back.
That night, I was reaching for a tea bag, the sound of the kettle drowning out the television in the living room, when the noise of Howard coming through his cat flap startled me. I glanced up and caught the expression on my face in the blackened kitchen window.
It was the same look, I realized, seeing my pale complexion, my round, scared eyes.
The same expression Jack had worn when he saw the guns.
Fear.
12
We were at my sister’s, just outside the city centre. Kate had been all over the world playing tennis, until recently. Her rank had been 608 at its best, but it had stopped climbing. She just couldn’t win the matches, once she’d reached that high. She came back over the summer; thirty and ready to give up.
‘Those who can’t … coach,’ she said drily, the first night she was back. She’d been fierce when she was striving. She played a match the day after Mum’s funeral, and won. I had often wondered if she felt bad for being away so much during Mum’s illness, but I could never ask.
The kitchen television was on, set to an obscure sports channel. The Valencia Open was playing.
There was a strange expression on Kate’s face as she was following the television. She used to watch hours and hours of her own matches back. Dad would record them for her.
She and her husband, Mez, had opened a mushroom farm when she came home; a business venture my dad found endlessly amusing. Mez was convinced it would make them a fortune. They were growing the mushrooms in their garage. Mum would’ve hated it, Kate and I privately agreed. She didn’t like mess.
We were sitting around Kate’s kitchen table.
‘I’ve got hold of a film. The new James Bond. The one that’s showing in the cinema,’ Dad said. He looked slyly across at me and winked.
He was forever trying to cut corners. He loved frugality, said he felt like he was beating the system. He once posted a McDonald’s coupon through my door before his holiday because he wouldn’t be able to use it in time. He’d got worse, since Mum died last year.
Sometimes, I still expected her to be there when I went over to their central Newcastle house with the little red front door, where the rooms were full of her stuff that Dad hadn’t yet thrown away. Sometimes, I felt dread that Mum would have baulked at my secretarial job, at my unplanned pregnancy. But then, at other moments, I felt hopeful as I remembered how much we had both loved watching One Born Every Minute together, and I’d feel a wave of loss – like I’d been picked up and transported somewhere alien and desolate.
‘Great,’ Jack said. I caught his eye. He hated James Bond. Said it was misogynistic. ‘The women end up dead or silenced,’ he would say to me. ‘What a load of crap.’
Jack’s body language – a jiggling leg, wild eyes – betrayed his anxiety: he was, after all, the quite new boyfriend who had got me pregnant. Dad kept looking at him, bemused. Jack was still on his best behaviour at these gatherings. Or so I thought, anyway.
‘I’ve downloaded it. It’s not legitimate. It’s a screener copy,’ Dad said, leaning in dramatically. ‘It’s still in the cinema.’
He was delighted with his thrift and I was momentarily embarrassed. At Jack’s, we had posh cheeses, dessert wines, home-made chutneys. When we were with my family, we watched illegally downloaded movies and sat around the kitchen table underneath a fluorescent strip light. Ambient it was not. I wondered what Jack thought. I wondered how we’d raise Wally; whether he might end up at a boarding school far away, keeping company with landed Scottish gentry.
‘I was hoping to make it another tradition,’ Dad declared.
Dad, Kate and I had a Tuesday tradition of going out for pudding. One night, after Mum died and everything felt hard, we sat down and decided that Tuesdays were the most rubbish day of all, and we decided to try to do something about it. We went out for dessert, that first Tuesday, and we’d been trying to do it weekly ever since.
But he was a creature of habit, our dad, so he was always looking for more. Let’s start Friday Films, he would say, or Saturday Salad, and we’d roll our eyes at him.
‘Let’s not watch Bond,’ Kate said to Dad. ‘We never speak to each other. And I’ve seen every recent movie.’
‘She really has,’ Mez said.
Mez was one of my favourite people. The only person who’d never pushed me about all the changes that ha
d happened after Mum died: leaving medicine, breaking up with Ben, moving into my own flat. There was no judgement from him, and I loved him for it. He was pale, with dark eyes that always looked slightly moody.
‘Trivial Pursuit?’ Kate said. ‘We got a new one.’
I barely suppressed a smile. Kate was an obsessive. She had been fixated with tennis, of course, but also computer science and knitting for a while. Whittling wood, for a time after that. Yoga three times a week for two straight months, then never again. Now, this autumn, it was Words with Friends and Trivial Pursuit. Soon they would rotate, and it would be badminton, pontoon and boules. Or flower arranging, or cycling.
‘You sure you’re ready to embarrass yourself in front of Jack Ross?’ I said, looking sideways at him.
‘I am totally ready,’ she said.
She always addressed Jack in that way: Jack Ross, Journalist. She’d said it the first time I told her about him.
She was wearing loads of gold bangles that slid down her arm as she retrieved the game board. She was often wearing such things now. Things she couldn’t wear before.
‘Are we still on for meeting your parents next weekend?’ Dad said. Ice cubes clinked in his glass as he lifted it. Behind him sat a set of weighing scales. He still weighed his pasta portions. Kate once called him anal personified.
I cringed. I hadn’t forgotten Dad’s insistence he meet Jack’s family once he’d got over the shock of me being pregnant, but I had tried to deflect it – did our families really need to meet? – although, it seemed, both sides wanted to. A polite ‘Oh yes, you should come up to Oban and stay’, proffered through Jack, had, somehow, become firm plans. Dad was needier now than he had been previously. Mum had been his social life, however much they had annoyed each other. And so now, cursory gestures loomed large and Dad always took people up on them.
Jack gave me a sidelong glance. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll double-check, but yes. They mentioned it last weekend.’ His voice was overly keen. He sounded false.
He had said to me, the day before meeting my dad for the first time, ‘What if I totally mess this up?’
‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ I had said.
Everything but the Truth Page 8
