Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘He said he saw you yelling at someone.’

  Jack looked up at me. His expression was almost amused. ‘Yelling?’

  ‘Yeah. He said he saw you in the town centre. Yelling.’

  ‘Me?’ The amused expression gave way to a full-on grin. ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever yelled at anybody.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You worried I’m terrorizing the locals? Maybe it was when Twitter went down and I went insane.’

  ‘Don’t joke, though – he really did see you.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A few weeks back.’

  ‘I really don’t … what was I even doing the week before last?’ He paused, thinking. ‘I had that deadline. I wasn’t even in town.’

  I thought back. He’d been subsisting on toast and coffee and typing a lot, I remembered that much. ‘No,’ I agreed.

  ‘Yelling,’ Jack said softly to himself.

  I thought back to Ben, after I had started accusing him. Right after Mum. Right after leaving medicine. He had snorted, at first. Been derisive. Not like Jack. He hadn’t taken me as seriously as Jack did.

  But that didn’t mean Jack wasn’t lying, I thought, while looking at him. He was considering me, looking sideways at me in the car.

  I thought of my Clare’s Law application, made the previous day. It was too early to hope that somebody would have looked at it by now.

  It was pouring with October rain. The windscreen had been covered in leaves when we set off, and a lone one remained, being wiped mercilessly back and forth, back and forth, almost escaping and then getting trapped against the screen again. Eventually, it was ripped in two, one half fluttering away on the motorway.

  It was Saturday morning. It was a sunny, cut-glass autumn day, and it was strange.

  We were in bed and Clare’s Law was forgotten.

  ‘Guess what my first thought of the morning always is?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I said. I was thinking: is Saturday morning not the absolute best time of the entire week?

  ‘It’s “what am I worrying about?” ’ Jack said.

  ‘That’s your first thought?’

  ‘Yep. And once I’ve found something, I feel happy again.’

  ‘That’s crazy. And kind of sad,’ I said, but my heart was singing. ‘I wish you weren’t always anxious. Though I like learning Jack-things.’

  He looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Oh, everyone will arrive soon. They’ll think we’re slobs.’

  ‘We are slobs.’

  ‘It’s a thing in our family. That I’m always late.’

  ‘You are,’ I said. I had lost count of the number of times I had threatened Jack, saying I would leave without him, sitting with the engine running on the drive while he faffed.

  ‘I read something about it. Late people forget to factor in the time it takes between tasks. So we think it takes no time to leave the house. Or to walk from the train station to a cafe two minutes away.’

  ‘I saw that. On your Twitter.’

  ‘Creeping on my Twitter, are you?’ he said. He tried to raise an eyebrow, then collapsed into laughter. ‘I just can’t flirt,’ he said. ‘I’m a goon.’

  Of course my suspicions felt a thousand miles away as we lay in bed.

  Jack’s parents were out. Supplies, they’d said. Cheese and Quality Street and wine. Kate was texting me every junction along the way. We could have come together, but Jack wanted to come up earlier than they did. He always wanted as much time in Oban as possible.

  Eventually, Jack got up and showered. I lay there for a few minutes in the warm bed, listening to him. He showered silently. He would never sing. He would be too embarrassed, too self-conscious.

  I got out of bed, moving through the cold air to go and make a cup of coffee. Tiredness shrouded me like a fog. I hadn’t slept much, again. Maybe pregnancy was preparing me for babyhood. I felt a rush of pleasure as I thought about holding a sleepy, milky newborn who was ours. ‘Got your dressing gown, sorry,’ I said through the bathroom door, the mint-scented vapour smelling fresh and sweet, like a steam room in a spa.

  ‘I bet you wear it better than me,’ he called through the door. ‘When’re they due?’

  ‘An hour,’ I said. ‘Maybe less.’

  And even though I’d been content, I’d been ignoring the impending meeting, and Jack reminding me made me shiver with nerves. It felt as though there was a pit of snakes in my stomach. At best, they weighed me down. At worst, they awoke, twisting over each other and making me nauseous. It was hard for me to tell quite what caused them. Maybe it was the anticipation of a familial clash; the awkward strain of keeping the conversation going, with everybody being on their best behaviour and not being able to escape up the road to a hotel for some banter, alone. Maybe it was concern at how different our families were; perhaps I was worried Dad would speak loudly of the Aldi daily deal as Jack’s father was decanting fine whisky. It was hard to say.

  I went into the bathroom and looked at Jack as he lathered shower gel into his forearms.

  ‘Mozart woke me up, in the night. Came and put his head on my chest. Thought I was having a heart attack,’ he said.

  I laughed. I closed the door to the bathroom behind me and walked down the stairs.

  It was perfect timing, I suppose. I heard the thud of the letter box as my foot was on the last stair. Davey was safely in his room. I was alone.

  It was a split-second decision to stride over to the front door, the mat prickling the soles of my feet, and pick up the small stack of post. My hand stopped on something before my brain realized what it was.

  ‘J. Douglas,’ it said in bold type in the address window.

  My entire body fizzed with shock. Douglas. Douglas. Douglas.

  16

  One year ago

  ‘I have a seven-letter word to start with,’ the boy said.

  My shift had officially ended over an hour ago.

  ‘Seriously?’ I said. ‘I have four As.’

  He began picking his Scrabble tiles up. It was a slow process. The rack was balanced across his chest, tilting up slightly on one end where it crossed with a wire. ‘CARPETS,’ he put across the star in the middle. He coughed.

  He was in for his latest round of chemo. We thought it had been going well.

  I placed my tiles –‘AGA’– coming down to the S of ‘CARPETS’.

  ‘Very posh,’ he said with a grin. ‘Ovens or army generals?’

  ‘Army generals.’

  He looked better when he smiled. He had those distinctive red wine-coloured stains underneath his eyes. They disappeared when he smiled, and he looked more like himself: the boy who was good at long division and loved Topps football cards and liked it when his mum brought him a Nando’s on a Friday night, much to the nurses’ disapproval. Not this boy with a life or death battle on his hands. He had changed, already, even though it was early days in his treatment. He was self-aware. Ironic, sometimes. Was starting to explore what music he was into, which cool books he could read. He grinned again, his steroid-bloated cheeks dimpling strangely, then turned my ‘AGAS’ into ‘AGASTACHE’. He let his arms flop by his sides, clearly exhausted by the effort of picking the tiles up and placing them on the board balanced on his stomach. ‘It’s not many points, but I’m pleased,’ he said.

  ‘Erm, for God’s sake,’ I said. ‘I’m going to resign. If this is part of my doctor duties, I’m failing.’

  ‘I’m just very, very bright,’ the boy said. He was joking, but he was confident like that. Pretty matter-of-fact about his skills: I’m good at maths and bad at cancer, he would say.

  ‘What is agastache? It had better not be a medical term.’

  ‘It’s pronounced agastacky. And no. It’s a flower.’

  ‘You know too much,’ I said. ‘Science, maths, Latin names for flowers.’

  ‘It’s Greek.’

  ‘Technically you’re not allowed foreign words.’

  ‘Don’t penalize me for being smart
.’

  I laughed, and so did he, but then his laugh turned into a hacking coughing fit.

  ‘How long have you had that cough?’ I said.

  ‘Few days. Nothing serious. Mum had a cold.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Where do you live?’ he said, looking at me curiously.

  I knew that curiosity well. I had often wondered about my university lecturers and the consultants who managed me. Who were they? I’d think as I watched them check mobile phones on the way out and get into cars with kooky air fresheners hanging from the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Just up the road. A ten-minute drive,’ I said. ‘Not far.’

  ‘Did you always want to be a doctor?’

  I met his eyes. ‘Why – do you?’

  ‘No. It’s a bit … I don’t know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rudimentary? That surgeon who cut my leg off had a Black and Decker.’

  I thought it was a fair assessment. Medicine was often more of a bodged job than a precise science. Sometimes, drugs worked where we thought they wouldn’t, and we simply shrugged our shoulders.

  I looked down at the bed. The blanket fell away at the boy’s stump like a cliff face unexpectedly crumbling into the sea. There should be flesh there, and instead there was nothing. I hoped it would always be strange to me; that I would always find it upsetting, even after he – my first difficult cure as the registrar in charge – had been discharged.

  ‘Yes,’ I said to him. ‘It’s an art, not a science, really.’

  ‘Are your parents doctors?’

  ‘No. God, no,’ I said with a laugh, imagining how anal my father would be in a hospital setting. ‘Dad’s an IT technician. Mum’s …’ I spoke before thinking, and wished I hadn’t. The car park lights were coming in through the window, getting in my eyes, and I reached to close the blind. The boy shifted in his bed, still looking at me.

  ‘Your mum?’

  ‘She died. Of cancer,’ I said quickly. ‘Not that long ago.’ I was embarrassed by how recently it had been, just the previous month. He might wonder why I was working, but life went on, even with that heavy weight on my chest, even when I was visiting Dad every night.

  ‘Bloody cancer,’ he muttered, sounding like an adult. ‘It’s everywhere.’

  ‘I know,’ I said softly. ‘I know.’

  He lifted an arm, then, to scratch his bald head, and he looked so like Mum had, as she had died – too thin, and bald – that I had to look away from him.

  ‘Is it hard, then? Treating people with cancer?’

  I blinked.

  Hardly anybody asked me that. Perhaps they had too many inhibitions that he didn’t have.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said quietly. ‘But it’s doing good, too.’ I shrugged then, embarrassed in the small, dim room.

  He gave a little smile, before changing the subject. ‘So, Rach – want to see something cool?’ He shifted again, and lifted his black T-shirt up. It revealed a Topps football card, tattooed on his ribs. A Newcastle United one.

  ‘Up the Toon,’ he laughed.

  I stood up, leaning closer, surprised. ‘When did you get that?’ I said.

  ‘Last week. To celebrate the halfway point, coming up.’ His chemo schedule was long. The longest of any patient I had treated.

  ‘Your mum didn’t let you?’ I was aghast; tattoos have all sorts of implications for people who are immunocompromised. ‘You won’t be able to give blood for ages. To give back.’

  I was admonishing him, and I had to stop myself. I wasn’t his parent.

  ‘She doesn’t know, obviously.’ He grinned and let his T-shirt go, so the tattoo was covered again. I couldn’t help but think clichéd thoughts: how would it look when he was sixty, and no longer interested in Topps football cards? What if he wanted to forget he ever had cancer?

  ‘Don’t tell her,’ he said quickly. ‘Please.’

  I ran a quick checklist in my mind. Did it affect his care? Probably not. ‘Okay,’ I said. I’d keep his secret.

  I leant over again. He drew the shirt up. It didn’t look infected. I rolled my eyes at him instead. Something in my gesture made him laugh, and it escalated to a giggling fit, and then to a coughing fit.

  There was something about the tone of that cough. It sounded too productive; like there was more phlegm than there should be.

  ‘Hang on,’ I said, pulling my stethoscope from behind my neck and putting it to his chest. ‘Breathe,’ I said.

  He was still coughing, trying to slow his breathing.

  I didn’t like the sound of that cough.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked Ben as soon as he arrived home. An old Nokia phone sat in front of me on the table.

  Ben was wearing a shirt and jeans. He’d been to the pub. He went every Thursday without fail, with his IT friends. He glanced at the phone, confused.

  ‘My old phone,’ he said, like it was some kind of trick.

  ‘I found it down the back of the sofa,’ I said.

  ‘Yes …?’

  ‘Why? What was it doing there? Is it a second phone?’

  His expression was perplexed, and then angry, a line appearing between his eyebrows. ‘No – no way,’ he said. ‘What?’

  ‘You have a second phone.’

  ‘I got my old phone out to find my passwords. I’d put them all on a memo thing.’

  I stared at him, scrutinizing him. The phone had been stuffed down between the cushions of the sofa. As if hidden. I’d turned it on, but it was password protected.

  ‘Can you show me?’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ Ben said, his expression changing from angry to wounded, like I had physically hurt him.

  I felt a flip then. From suspicion to nothing. I could see, immediately, that he wasn’t lying. Why had I asked?

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I … sorry.’

  ‘You think I’d cheat on you?’ he said, still standing in the doorway.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Is this about …?’ He looked over his shoulder, as if indicating something.

  I knew immediately what he meant. Mum. Dad had found the emails just a few weeks ago. Not just the emails; texts, too. The sordid messages my mother had sent to their mutual friend. Those smutty texts that had betrayed us all.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I just saw the phone and I thought – something.’

  But I could see he had a point. It wasn’t like me. Jumping to conclusions. Usually I considered everything. What was happening?

  ‘Rach, maybe you should speak to someone. About your mum? It’s all been so sudden.’

  ‘Don’t psychoanalyse me,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  17

  Present day

  I looked behind me at the stairs and listened for a second. I heard the squeak as the shower switched off. He’d get dressed: I had a minute. I needed to look at that letter. That inexplicable letter to Douglas. I just had to find out more, to keep moving forward like a marathon runner.

  I ripped the envelope and slipped the letter out. It was as easy as buying a pint of milk, that act, that illegal act.

  ITEM 4

  www.scottishreview.co.uk

  J. Douglas

  The Pine Needles

  Gallanach Road

  Oban

  PA34 4PG

  Dear Mr Douglas,

  Novel Competition

  We wanted to tell you about our novel competition launching in January of next year. As a past contributor to The Scottish Review we wanted you to be the first to know. It’s being judged by a top literary agent and has a prize of £500. The length can be anything between 50,000 and 100,000 words and the deadline closes on 31 March.

  We look forward to receiving your entry! Please see our website above for more information.

  The Scottish Review

  I ran my finger over the letter. Over his name. Maybe it wasn’t for him. Maybe it was old post, for an old occupant. But … Douglas. Writing.

  I kept reading and rereading it, thinking I’d missed
something. Of course I knew my boyfriend’s name; of course I knew what Wally’s surname was to be. Didn’t I?

  His Facebook was Jack Ross. His Twitter handle was @jrosswriter. He even joked he’d got mistaken for Jonathan Ross once on there and got loads of abuse. His parents’ surname was Ross: the other post still clutched in my hand was addressed to Mr and Mrs Ross. Davey was Davey Ross. What was I on about? Get a grip.

  Those irrelevant, petty thoughts about my boyfriend’s name were circling like vultures, but at the centre was the other thought: the carcass they were circling over, swooping down on, pecking at. Jack received bizarre emails about a Douglas; and he was, it seemed, sometimes called Douglas himself.

  I put the letter back in the envelope. There was some Sellotape in the drawer in the kitchen and I taped it up. I put the pile of post back on the doormat. And then I paused, waiting in the hallway, listening for Jack’s feet on the stairs.

  As soon as I heard him, I acted. I remembered that adrenaline rush, how useful it was, the hypothalamus telling the adrenal glands to do their thing. I wasn’t dwelling on what I’d found or worrying about it. I was going to fix it, like a doctor rushing with a crash cart to a patient in need.

  I headed with purpose for the hallway. ‘You’ve got mail,’ I said to him over my shoulder as he began descending the stairs. I managed to say it with a smile that felt stiff.

  Jack hesitated, and that bolstered me. He slowed, both feet on one stair, then reached his right hand out towards me, as if to stop me crossing a busy road.

  I stood with the post, flicking through it, as if just seeing it for the first time. ‘Oh, wait,’ I said, faux casually. ‘Two for your parents, one for Davey and – what’s this? It’s not for you?’ I held the offending envelope up.

  ‘Oh no, it is,’ Jack said, but didn’t explain. Instead, he walked into the kitchen and filled the kettle, his back to me. ‘You want caffeine? Or are you over your limit?’ he said.

  He was solicitous like that; he knew I preferred proper coffee, proper tea, but worried about Wally.

  ‘I think there’s some posh herbal stuff somewhere,’ he said, opening cupboards and rummaging.

  ‘But it says J. Douglas?’ I said, trying to keep my tone light as I followed him into the kitchen.