Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  Redacted

  Every time I came across a story about him, it jolted me to read John. I don’t know why that felt like the biggest aspect of it all, but it did.

  It was so easy to do, googling him. Nobody would ever know.

  Audrey and Kate took me swimming one evening that week. They were staging an intervention. I told them Jack and I hadn’t broken up, but they just nodded. Audrey knew why. Kate didn’t.

  Kate was swimming, but Audrey and I were standing in the shallow end, up to our waists in water.

  ‘She’s really good,’ Audrey said.

  Kate was swimming length after length without pausing. Her body was svelte and muscular.

  ‘She used to swim. For tennis training,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah. I remember that. Didn’t she get up at five?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  I loved that she knew everything about my life. Our shared history.

  Something must have sparked a memory, because after a pause, she said, ‘Do you miss Amrit? Working with him? You always had such … lols.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said sadly, remembering all those shared Diet Cokes.

  I even missed the parts of it that I had hated, the constant distorted tiredness from shift work. The inability to keep to firm plans, always being over an hour late to dinners. And the rest. The strange quirks of being a doctor. Sitting at a Hallowe’en party when half an hour previously I’d been stitching somebody’s skin together. Listening to stories of office work when my job had involved the very extremes of human experience: being born and dying, and death-bed wishes, and seeing a patient’s heart beating in the flesh right before me during an operation, and people who heard voices, and people who didn’t want to be alive any more.

  I looked across at Audrey. The air in the swimming pool was warm and sticky, and her veins were standing out, thick and fat against her skin. In the strangest way, I even missed cannulating, especially adults. The push and then the give as you found the vein. It would be like riding a bike, I knew it would. It would be so easy to go back. But I wouldn’t.

  Audrey changed the subject. ‘I wanted to see how you were doing with Jack. I know it looks bad. I know you think I really liked Ben, but … I’ve never seen you with anyone how you are with Jack. It’s like you’re all lit up around him.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, smiling. ‘That’s nice. That’s really nice. You did like Ben.’

  She walked a few paces, moving her arms through the water.

  I remembered the night he finally left. It was awful, but not in the way I’d expected. It wasn’t long after I’d left medicine, and the accusations that increased after I stopped practising had reached a height. He’d driven away, and I’d felt only shame. I’d opened the fridge and stared uselessly at a water bottle whose insides had misted over.

  And then, the next day, the relief had started to creep in. That I didn’t have to put up with somebody playing endless Xbox games, or tinkering with their car constantly. That I could stretch out in the bed by myself. That I could move. Get a flat. Get a pet. It wasn’t love, I realized on the third night. It was as easy as that. Real life was complicated: I had driven him away with my paranoia, but it was actually for the best. We didn’t love each other. Not properly.

  ‘I think about him sometimes, you know,’ Audrey said then. Her tone was strange. Tentative.

  ‘Ben?’ I said, confused.

  ‘No. Chris. You know.’

  I did know. The man she’d slept with. She hardly ever talked about him. Perhaps she was willing to now, to show me that nobody was perfect.

  I nodded, remembering the precise moment she had emerged from his room, across from mine, at university. I’d only just introduced her to Amrit. They were smitten, I’d thought. They’d been on five dates.

  I hadn’t needed to say anything to her, just thrown her a questioning look across our halls of residence corridor.

  ‘It was nothing,’ she’d said, closing his door behind her. ‘Amrit’s away.’

  We’d hardly said a word about it, since then. But it had made me view her differently – just slightly. I had thought about it on their wedding day, during my speech, and plenty of times after that, when I worked with Amrit.

  ‘Do you regret it?’ I asked now. Audrey stood very straight. She was tall, and usually stooped. She didn’t look at all like a lawyer, I found myself thinking.

  ‘Of course. I feel awful about it. Especially when I think about you and Jack. When you’re the liar, it’s sort of … justified.’

  ‘Justified?’ I said, bristling.

  ‘No – not justified. But, like … I know how much I love Am. So I know how little it meant. I know that. If I told him, he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t know how truly meaningless it was.’

  ‘Maybe it being meaningless makes it worse,’ I suggested.

  ‘Maybe.’

  I looked across at her. She scooped up some water in her hands and let it trickle down her arms. There was a moment of silence, charged and heavy, and then Audrey looked up at me.

  ‘What’re you going to do about Jack, anyway?’ she said.

  ‘Stay. I love him. And the baby,’ I said.

  Wally was at the heart of it. Why I let things slide. Why I didn’t scan and re-scan, when I was unsure, like I’d done at work. Why I blindly kept trying to patch things over, covering a wound so deep it really needed stitches instead.

  28

  One year ago

  The boy’s mum came over to me after I’d finished drawing the curtain around a girl with meningitis who was recovering well.

  ‘Hi,’ I said to her.

  She looked expectant, like somebody about to open a million-pound negotiation. I raised my eyebrows and led her to a side room. It was a side room I’d slept in, often, on the sofa by the wall during night shifts.

  ‘He’s in for chemo,’ she said. ‘Palliative.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘But we saw the consultant on the ward round, yesterday.’

  ‘Daniel Curtis?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I think so. He gave us a pep talk – about how many advances have been made. About how, if they can keep the cancer stable, there’s no reason why he won’t live for years. Decades.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘If we can keep the cancer stable.’

  ‘Can’t we? Can’t you?’

  ‘We’ll do all we can.’

  ‘I want to know specifically what you’ll do for him. What you’ll do to ensure it doesn’t grow.’

  I hesitated. ‘Well … his sarcoma didn’t go into remission very easily. I need you to know that the typical survival rate in his category is twenty out of every one hundred. That’s five-year survival.’ I said it bluntly in order to be kind. It was better to know it all at once. So then she would be able to come to terms with it. To enjoy the time he had left.

  ‘Twenty’s not none.’ She reached out and fingered the blinds, parting them slightly and peering out.

  She wasn’t looking at me, and I needed her to; to understand what I was saying. We wished it could be different, but it wasn’t. The boy’s prognosis was poor. It was poorer than other patients with his stage of disease. The best thing would be for his mum to understand this, so we could make him comfortable. So they could come to terms with death, before it arrived. To be at peace. That was what I wanted for them. That was all we could hope for.

  ‘Yes, but there are some things specific to his case. He has a temperature. He’s generally unwell. It was quite advanced when we caught it. It’s … I’m very sorry. But I want you to be aware. Of how long you’ve got together. Of how it’s likely to be.’

  She made a kind of gasping noise. It was awful, animalistic, as she realized the truth herself. ‘So the chemo might do nothing?’

  I nodded.

  She seemed to think for a moment. ‘It seems so easy. Just stop it growing.’

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ I said. ‘Though I wish it was.’

  ‘He’s been so
upbeat since the consultant. I know he’s going to ask you about it.’ She pointed behind her, with her thumb. The nail was chewed.

  ‘About his prognosis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I fiddled with my stethoscope. I had a monkey clipped to it. It entertained the younger children during their obs. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m happy to talk to him about it.’ I would look him up again later, I decided. See how he was feeling. The social media window into his soul.

  I looked out of the window, between the blinds. I could see the boy, sitting up in one of the chemotherapy chairs.

  His mum was looking at me. She had an eighties perm, and her eyes were ringed with thick black eyeliner. She was silent again. And then she said, ‘Who wins here?’

  Her tone was imbued with the voice of somebody who’d had to advocate for her child for years. And he still was her child, in the eyes of the law and the medico-legal world. He was still a minor.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you tell him.’

  I met her eyes. There was a threat there, in their slight narrowing.

  ‘Well, I would need your consent to discuss anything like this with him,’ I said, mulling it over.

  Whether or not he was competent to receive the news himself depended on lots of things: his age, his maturity, what he wanted to know, what his mum wanted him to know. But, ultimately, she held the trump card until he turned eighteen.

  ‘I don’t want him to know how long he’s got. It’s not good for him,’ she said.

  ‘I would like you to think carefully about that,’ I replied slowly. ‘If he’s going to ask me, I don’t want to have to lie. He’ll ask others who are in chemo with him. He’ll google it. If he really wants to know.’

  Her eyes flickered in annoyance. ‘Listen –’ she said, reaching out to grip my arm.

  Her hand was icy cold. I could feel it even through my white coat.

  ‘– your instructions are not to say a word to him.’

  ‘I think we should have a meeting. With the consultant. And the Trust’s lawyer,’ I said.

  ‘Fine. But you won’t be telling him. He’s happier. He believes he’s got years.’

  I looked out at the boy. He was tapping away on his phone. I thought privately that he might not even have months.

  It was awkward, uncomfortable, that Tuesday morning, that conversation. Later, in the debrief meeting, I had to repeat it all, in as much detail as I could. I stated what had happened, but couldn’t capture the context. The stuff that wasn’t verbal. The parking ticket she was holding between her forefinger and thumb. She kept flicking the edge of it. It was dog-eared by the end of our conversation. Nor did I detail her blackened tears as her eyeliner ran. Instead I just noted down the words, said it had been an emotional meeting. No context.

  ‘I am not consenting to you telling him when he’s going to die,’ she said.

  She couldn’t have been clearer. No consent. No news.

  I turned to the door.

  It was classic denial. She didn’t want to face it, and she wouldn’t let him, either.

  Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

  NHS NUMBER: 0246503/6

  PATIENT RECORD SUMMARY:

  Note: Patient is under no circumstances to be told anything related to his prognosis.

  29

  Present day

  I rang Audrey at five to ten in the evening, two nights later.

  I’d lasted a day before checking the Internet again. It was all too easy, that sort of research. Mining for information. It felt distinct, somehow, from hiding in the bushes outside Jack’s house, or driving past his place of work, though perhaps it was just the same.

  ‘I was just thinking about you,’ she said warmly. ‘I’m at bloody work. Was going to send a Code Red text.’

  ‘You’re at work – why?’ I said.

  She seemed to regularly do longer shifts than I ever did, for no more pay. Audrey would often – back in my medicine days – describe herself as being on nights and on long day shifts all at the same time.

  ‘Disclosure,’ she said. ‘For Adam.’

  Adam was her boss, one of the other partners at the firm. He’d never spoken to me.

  ‘No idea,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t bore you with it. What’s up with you? How’s Jack?’

  ‘I’ve been reading more articles,’ I admitted.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘Just trying to find out as much as I can about what went on. He’s just so vague about it. Sometimes. It feels like he’s not telling me everything.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ she said softly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask – what did he get off on?’

  ‘You sound like such a lawyer. He got off …’ I said slowly, scrolling up through the articles to quote it to her. ‘Self-defence, I think? I don’t know, actually. I can’t tell. They’re only screenshots. I don’t know where the articles are.’

  ‘That’ll help. Knowing that,’ she said. ‘If you can read the judgment you’ll know why he was acquitted. Hang on …’

  I heard the clunk of a door, a soft thud, then footsteps. Heels on marble. She was in the foyer – alone, I supposed. I hated that foyer. My stomach clenched every time I walked through it. It was so different to a hospital.

  ‘Google this,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Type exactly what I say.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘H. M. Advocate v Douglas, 2010.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, typing into my laptop. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Okay, go to Scottish Law Reports. Google that. Then type that reference into the search box. Use my details to log in. We have access to all the law reports.’ She lowered her voice and said, ‘Audrey Kapur, password Amritsunshine1.’

  ‘Got it,’ I said.

  It loaded. It was a thick block of text. Tiny font, no paragraphs.

  ‘It will only have the headnote. Not the judgment. What does it say next to “verdict”?’

  I read it off the screen. ‘Not proven,’ I said.

  There was a pause. A loaded pause. A pause more pregnant than I was. It yawned on and on.

  ‘Not proven?’ Audrey repeated.

  ‘Yes, that’s what it says. Audrey, you’re freaking me out. Say something. What’s going on?’

  ‘Do you know what a not proven verdict is?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It is distinct from not guilty.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s the bastard’s verdict, Rach,’ she said softly.

  My body went cold. ‘The what?’

  ‘It’s … that is unusual,’ she said. ‘Did he say why? There’s normally …’

  ‘What?’ I asked again.

  ‘It’s not a “not guilty”, Rach. It exists only in Scotland. Type it into Google.’

  I did as she said, my fingers shaking.

  ITEM 11

  Not proven is a verdict available only in Scottish trials. Such a trial may end in three verdicts: not guilty, which results in an acquittal; guilty, which results in a conviction; and not proven. Not proven technically results in an acquittal, though it is not to be confused with not guilty. It is usually reserved for times when the judge or jury is not sufficiently convinced of the defendant’s innocence to return a not guilty verdict, but has inadequate evidence to convict him or her.

  ‘What does it mean?’ I said, a round of fear starting off like a huge ship’s wheel turning in my stomach. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s still an acquittal,’ she reassured me quickly. ‘Night, Sam. I’ll send the power of attorney for signing once it’s drafted,’ she said to somebody else, then resumed. ‘There are two ways to get off in Scotland. Not guilty and not proven. Not proven is … well. There will have been … some ambiguity.’

  ‘He wasn’t found not guilty?’ I said, just realizing.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wow.’
<
br />   ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  The nuance between not guilty and not proven felt as wide as the Atlantic Ocean just then; important in ways I couldn’t see, couldn’t understand, like feeling my way around a room in the dark, making sense of the shapes but knowing instinctively where the walls were.

  ‘The bastard’s verdict,’ I said dully. A hot flash came over me, heating my cheeks as if I had submerged myself in hot water. The judge or jury is not sufficiently convinced of the defendant’s innocence.

  I was trying to remember what exactly Jack had said to me. Had he said he was found not guilty? No, I didn’t think he had. He’d said acquitted, which was technically correct. But he wasn’t getting off lying to me on technicalities.

  I scrolled through the photos on my laptop. The latest photograph was a selfie, of him and Howard. They were in bed together, Howard sitting up in the crook of Jack’s arm. He’d emailed it to me. The caption read ‘squad goals’.

  ‘I wish I didn’t like him so much,’ I murmured. ‘He’s so funny.’

  ‘There is nothing so dangerous as a funny man,’ Audrey said.

  ‘True.’ I sighed. ‘He’ll tell me it’s in the past. If I ask.’

  ‘Do you know why he was acquitted?’

  ‘No. I don’t really know any details. One of the articles said there was a question over whether he used reasonable force, but it’s just vague. And he’s vague, too. He talked about policy.’

  ‘Do you know what we could do?’ Audrey said.

  I loved her for that we.

  ‘No. What?’

  I lay on my bed, moved the curtain slightly and peered out at the Newcastle night. The Wok Bar over the road had lit up my bedroom a reddish pink. I loved that city-centre flat.

  ‘We could order the trial transcript,’ she said. ‘Anyone can. They’re public documents.’

  I looked out at the sky, bleached white from the city lights. He wasn’t not guilty. And he hadn’t told me.

  More lies, even when he was telling the truth. Did he think I wouldn’t find out?

  ‘Do it,’ I said.

  ITEM 22

  From Wikipedia: Because the ‘not proven’ verdict carries with it an implication of guilt, but no formal conviction, the accused is often seen as morally guilty … the one thing all not proven verdicts have in common is a central huge ambiguity; either as to the identity of the defendant or the evidence itself.