Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Looking at all the old training blogs of my opponents,’ she admitted sheepishly. ‘Their deleted tweets.’

  ‘So what exactly is it?’

  ‘The articles have been deleted, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s like the Internet’s recycling bin. A snapshot of the Internet before things were removed.’ She typed it into her phone and handed it to me.

  ITEM 8

  Wayback Machine: Tips on Usage

  The Wayback Machine is an Internet tool which will allow you to access the sordid underbelly of the Internet. Most websites have been sporadically archived over the years. Simply go to the Wayback Machine’s home page and type the URL of the page that’s missing. You can then choose the date on which you would like to see the page, as it was then.

  That website you created aged 14? Available. Your old LiveJournal entries that you deleted? Also available. Anything that was deleted off the Internet – gone forever – isn’t really. It’s recorded right there for you to look at – and it’s completely free.

  ‘So just type in the URL of one of the articles, or whatever,’ she said. ‘One of them will be cached.’ She didn’t seem concerned.

  She didn’t know the whole story. But her indifference rubbed off on to me. In the open Oban skies, with Jack having promised me and met my eyes the previous night, the text of the articles felt irrelevant, somehow.

  ‘Anyway. Don’t be paranoid,’ she continued. ‘I bet it’s just about Mum and stuff. I’ve found it hard. Missing tennis. Missing her.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, a fat feeling in my throat as I thought of the way she would always – without fail – call me every Monday. Even though she had nothing to say.

  ‘You’ll be a great mum. Trust me. You’re pretty conscientious. You practised medicine. That’s hard.’

  I nodded. I didn’t tell her what I was thinking, though. That I hadn’t practised medicine well enough. That I sometimes thought of the baby inside me as the boy. That maybe I had to pay for what I did. Penance. That I could atone with this child. My child.

  My heart sped up as I thought about it. Here I was, confused about Jack, wanting to know more about him, and there was a huge secret that sat in the middle of our relationship that he had no idea about.

  He didn’t even know there was a secret. He was clueless.

  22

  I realized slowly that I was going to keep searching. It was as though Jack’s late-night promise was a painkilling injection that gradually wore off.

  Kate and I carried on walking, in silence, and I kept thinking about Jack’s locked-gaze look, the reassurance I got from it. But, like all reassurances, it became less potent over time.

  I could just take a little look, I thought. He’d never know. It would ease my worries. And then we could all move on. I didn’t stop to think what would happen if the articles said something I didn’t want to see. I’d already made up my mind.

  But I could not get away after the walk. We had dinner. Then Jack’s father insisted on going to a whisky bar near the water. Davey didn’t want to go, was shouting in the restaurant car park about getting home, but Jack talked him down.

  And all the while I had my phone with me. I could have snuck off to the toilet, copied the URL of one of the articles, pasted it into the tiny Wayback Machine in my miniaturized browser, but something stopped me.

  The pub Tony chose was beautiful. It was strung with fairy lights running like webbing across its ceiling. It was in the bay, but high up, so the sea mists drifted across the cliff tops and over towards us. On any other day I could have sat and watched those drifts for hours, but not that day. I couldn’t wait to be alone.

  We sat inside, though some brave people sat outside, rubbing their hands together and holding them over the candles that flickered in the sea gusts. There were floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the roiling, churning ocean. The sunset in the west had reflected back over the sea, and everything was tinted a strange, heather purplish-blue.

  I was next to Jack, nervous. He put his arm around me. His jumper was cold from outside. The ocean was drawing in, slowly, and I saw the wet sand marks getting higher and higher up the beach the longer we watched.

  ‘Nice to meet your ken,’ Tony said to me, raising his glass. ‘Whit’s fur ye’ll no go past ye.’

  I smiled at him, but was frowning inside. What?

  Cynthia toasted too, laughing. They were always doing things like this. Little Scottish in-jokes.

  Jack’s parents and Dad started chatting and Kate was at the bar, so Jack, Davey and I sat in a row. Davey was scrolling aimlessly down his phone. He was often doing that. He didn’t seem to be reading. He would take his phone out, scroll, and put it away again. Over and over. He received texts, but never responded to them. He didn’t write, Jack said. He could – but he didn’t.

  Davey’s head snapped up after a minute. ‘I want to blow that candle out,’ he said. His eyes focused across the room.

  ‘Uh oh,’ Jack said in a low voice. ‘Not now.’

  I followed Davey’s gaze. Only one of the tables inside had a candle on it, a taper candle dripping wax in an old wine bottle. Davey’s body language had changed. He was sitting up, rigid, like a dog waiting for a ball to be thrown.

  ‘That’s their candle. They like it lit,’ Jack said gently.

  ‘I’m going to get it,’ Davey said. He began to push himself off his seat.

  Jack looked at him, then at me, and then at the couple across the room. ‘Hold on,’ he said. He strode over to them.

  I couldn’t help but look at his small waist, the inverted triangular shape of his back, at the way his large hands faced forwards. I loved his walk, I found myself thinking. I loved his walk and his clothes and the way he was reaching out an arm to the couple, who were looking up at him. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he gestured over to us, and they smiled, then nodded, looking understanding.

  Jack arrived back with the candle. ‘It was theirs,’ he said to Davey. ‘So enjoy it.’

  Davey grinned at Jack – a rare, wide, genuine smile – took a deep breath, and blew it out. He inhaled slowly, looking at the softly curling smoke. That smell would forever remind me of Christingle services at church when I was young; a candle pressed into an orange, hundreds of them blown out at once. Davey was dabbing his fingers in the cooling wax, rolling it into balls, and Jack turned to me.

  ‘In a year,’ he said, in a low voice, ‘where will we be?’

  I calculated it in my mind, as I always did. Time wasn’t time any more. Time was how long until Wally, or how old will Wally be?

  ‘Wally will be seven and a half months,’ I said.

  ‘Quick maths.’ Jack flashed me a smile. ‘What do babies do at seven and a half months, then?’

  He was drawling; a special voice he reserved only for me. It was deep, quiet; private.

  ‘They smile, they sit, they eat some solid food.’

  ‘Wonder what he’ll like?’

  ‘Isn’t it weird? All the possibilities. From their hair colour to their build to what food they like, what job they do, if they’re funny or sensitive or both.’

  ‘I know. And he’ll be me and you. Combined. Wonder when he’ll have his first Wagon Wheel?’

  ‘He might be a girl,’ I said, though I felt like Wally would be a boy. ‘Besides, they’ll have discontinued them by then.’

  Jack lived in fear of Wagon Wheels not being made any more.

  Jack pulled a mock-horrified face. ‘Don’t say that ever again.’

  ‘I hope he’s more like you,’ I said. And in that moment I meant it.

  Jack’s straight, dark lashes. His almost black irises. His self-effacing humour. His anxiety. His swagger. The way he took a cup of coffee into the shower with him to drink. There was so very much I liked about Jack.

  ‘No way. You’re excellent,’ he said. He started ticking off items on his fingers. ‘Smarter than me. More attractive than me. Cooler than me.’
<
br />   ‘I’m not cool.’

  ‘You so are,’ he said. He reached over and brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. ‘Super cool.’

  It was such an intimate moment that I couldn’t help but ask, one last time, before I went back to his parents’ house and read those articles.

  ‘Does everything we said last night still stand?’ I said. ‘About you and me?’

  ‘Of course,’ Jack said, without missing a beat. He covered my hand with his. It was cold and slightly wet from holding his Coke. He met my eyes and smiled.

  It was the death knell, that smile. It started ringing out that night, and it didn’t stop until morning.

  23

  One year ago

  ‘I’m very, very sorry to say that the cancer has spread,’ I said. A sentence no doctor ever wants to say, and no patient ever wants to hear.

  The boy’s eyes widened, and he turned instinctively to his mum, just as I had turned to my own mum in a similar appointment room not that long ago.

  ‘What does that mean?’ she said.

  ‘I’m afraid it means that while it can be treated, it can no longer be cured,’ I said. ‘There are mets in his lungs – hence his cough.’

  He’d become a six-feet-something music aficionado; a sixteen-year-old man who described himself as a socialist, who could pick up a guitar and play virtually any tune, and who could beat you at chess in less than fifteen minutes. But he was also terminally ill. He wouldn’t see seventeen, I was sure of it. His cancer had defied the chemotherapy, metastasizing even during his treatment. He’d had his primary diagnosis less than three months ago.

  I looked at them. They looked utterly bewildered. Bedraggled, almost, as if the news was a huge gust of wind that had knocked them over and they’d only just picked themselves up again. They could never un-know that news. Once you know something, you can’t fool your brain any more. Never again.

  ‘But you literally took my leg off,’ he said, nodding at his grey-and-black prosthesis, even though it was only just detectable underneath his jeans. ‘I’ve been having chemo. How can it have spread?’

  ‘It blooms out,’ I said, looking straight at him.

  It did. It was like blowing a dandelion. His was vicious, aggressive, and he’d harboured it for a long time before we could cut it out and find a drug that worked. In hindsight, it’s amazing when it works, when it doesn’t spread. All it takes is one determined seed, blown around in the winds of the body.

  ‘What …’ he began. ‘What about my GCSEs? And seeing Foals?’

  I looked down at my lap. Foals were a band. I was only twenty-eight, still half-aware which bands were touring.

  I didn’t answer him then. I couldn’t. All of that was to be shut out like a light. Life would go from looking to the future – to university – and slowly diminish. Soon he wouldn’t book a gig more than a month in advance. And then, a week. And it wouldn’t be a gig, it would be a trip to see a friend for half an hour. And then nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Forever.

  ‘We’ll try to keep it at bay for as long as possible,’ I prattled, moving stealthily back into doctor mode, the words running out of my mouth.

  ‘But aren’t there …? There are different therapies to try, aren’t there? Radiotherapy, more chemotherapy? Can’t you just – why can’t you just cut it out of him?’ his mum said.

  ‘We can definitely manage this,’ I said, and I saw the boy brighten. ‘All those are options. But what I need you to understand is that this will never go away.’

  I tried to be as clear as possible. It was kinder, in the long run, though not every doctor agreed.

  ‘So this is terminal,’ she said.

  ‘We prefer to say incurable. Who knows how long anybody has?’ I said.

  And the boy looked straight at me, navy-blue eyes looking bright in the slice of sun he was sitting in.

  ‘What now?’ he said, directly to me.

  I thought of all those nights I’d kept him company when he was neutropenic, playing Scrabble, chatting, and I felt an ice cube of sadness settle in my stomach. He leant forward, his head between his knees, for a second, and let out a kind of animalistic noise. And then he reached across to my desk, snatched up a heavy glass paperweight and threw it into the corner of the room. It marked the wall, then settled next to the skirting board. His mum stared at him in shock. He was still looking at me, as though it had never happened.

  ‘Some people live for years with incurable cancer,’ his mum said. ‘Don’t they?’

  And so the balancing act began, between medicine and compassion, between quality and quantity of life. There was no point having two years if you were sick from chemo every single day of them. I knew that, and yet part of me wanted to buy him as much time as possible, like doing a deal with the Devil.

  ‘Yes, they do,’ I said, my voice barely a croak. But not with cancer like this. Like Mum’s. Aggressive. Determined.

  I could cite many platitudes: that it could be considered more a chronic illness, these days. That people often defied the odds. But it wouldn’t be right to offer them to him, because, in his case, I didn’t believe them.

  I saw them both, much later, when I was locking the door to my office for the evening. They were limping along, the boy coughing, too. They didn’t notice me.

  The boy’s nurse walked over to him. ‘Get that down you,’ she said, providing him with his prescription for oral chemo. ‘That’ll do you the world of good.’

  ‘The doctors can manage this, can’t they?’ his mum said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ the nurse said, folding her arms across her ample chest. ‘Absolutely. I knew someone who had bone mets for fifteen years. It’s not as it was.’ She reached an arm out to touch the boy’s shoulder.

  I saw the relief flash across his face. His eyes closed in a slow blink, and when he opened them again he was smiling. I wanted to interject. To tell them how voracious Ewing’s sarcoma was. To tell them how high his tumour markers already were. But I didn’t. I stayed silent, watching. Thinking.

  24

  Present day

  It was midnight, and I was finally alone in one of the Rosses’ bathrooms. I had my phone with me, hadn’t got changed, so it was ensconced in my jeans pocket. Jack was in bed. I hoped he’d fall asleep, as he often did, before me. Everybody else was in bed. I’d waited. I had a fully charged phone and I knew the Wi-Fi password. I was ready.

  One of the bath taps – they were brass, maybe copper – was dripping. The cold one. A tree branch was beating against the side of the house. I could hear unidentified snoring and smell the whisky that seemed to have seeped into the walls of Jack’s house.

  I looked down at the phone and steeled myself.

  ITEM 9

  Now I don’t need to tell you how rubbish the police are at responding to calls about repeated break-ins. Just look at the case of John Douglas. (Edited to add – link broken – basically, he was a man who was burgled repeatedly. The police ignored his and his family’s repeated cries for help, until one night, when the burglars arrived again, John Douglas shot one of them in the head.)

  I sat on the side of the bath for a long time after reading the blog post. Okay, Rachel, think, I kept saying to myself. Only I couldn’t. I couldn’t think. Why had I looked at midnight? Why had I looked in Oban? Why had I looked the weekend Dad and Kate were sleeping soundly in the spare rooms?

  He’d shot someone. I’d found out in parentheses on some blogger’s site. That was the only mention in the whole post.

  I carried on reading the comments. I couldn’t stop. One of them was from the writer of the main post: ‘I managed to find a screenshot of the Douglas article,’ he had commented. The article had been pasted by him into the comments below, buried deep in the bowels of the internet. I clicked it to enlarge it, and read every word.

  JOURNALIST WALKS FREE AFTER KILLING CHILD

  The Flying Scotsman

  10 April 2010

  A SCOTTISH journalist has walked free followi
ng a murder trial in Glasgow High Justiciary Court. The verdict of not …

  [To read this article and all our articles, subscribe for full access here. If you already have a subscription, please log in here.]

  Murder.

  Jack had killed someone.

  Could it be true? It didn’t feel like it could. The world felt changed. I couldn’t believe everything was still standing. That the bath was still over there, taps still dripping. That my phone was still lit up. That everybody was still sleeping.

  The window was misted up, and I wiped it to look out. The pond behind the house was a greenish-black, like an onyx stone. I wondered if it had happened here. The shooting. The killing. The death.

  And then, right there in the bathroom, I had my first ever panic attack. I’d read about them in medical school. I understood them: the sudden release of adrenaline, like turning on a fast-running tap. The amygdala activated into fight or flight mode. But I’d never experienced it, until then.

  My boyfriend. He’d killed someone. My baby. Me. What would we do?

  I couldn’t breathe. Oh God. I couldn’t breathe.

  I waited out the night. I don’t know how I did it.

  The only time I’d ever stayed up all night was when I was paid to do it, the splintered on-call hours rushing by, distorted and confusing.

  This was totally different. The hours moved like honey dripping from a spoon. It was two o’clock for ages, and then three. Jack snored next to me, and all the while, I looked at him. And the worst of it was that I lay there, next to him, and my only thought, at the end of the night, was: so you are an excellent liar, after all.

  All those hopes I’d had.

  All those times I’d rationalized his behaviour.

  Every inconsistency I’d spotted and dismissed as paranoia.

  I’d been totally wrong.

  Blind.

  The next day I couldn’t get him alone, not for long enough. My knees trembled every time we sat down with everyone. I didn’t eat. My stomach felt acidic and queasy. Jack reached for my hand while walking back from lunch, and I jumped. Time drifted by, like the Oban mists, so slowly it felt sometimes like it had stopped entirely.