Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  Adlamont Murder: Monson was working as a tutor when, on 10 August 1893, he took his charge, Hamborough, a young man, out for a day’s shooting. A shot rang out across the estate in the afternoon and Monson was seen retreating with a gun. Later, Monson was seen cleaning the gun. Two weeks before his death, Hamborough had taken out two life insurance policies in the name of Monson’s wife. Monson’s account is that Hamborough shot himself by accident. Monson was found not proven at trial.

  Madeleine Smith: Smith was, controversially at the time, dating a Frenchman her parents disapproved of during early 1855. The Frenchman, called L’Angelier, ended their relationship suddenly. Smith was seen ordering arsenic in a pharmacy, where she signed in as M. H. Smith. L’Angelier died on 23 March 1857 of arsenic poisoning. The jury at her murder trial returned the verdict of not proven. It could not be proven beyond reasonable doubt that Smith had met L’Angelier immediately prior to his death.

  Google search: recent not proven verdicts

  Dave Grimes: Grimes, at his trial for rape in March 2013, walked free following a not proven verdict. Catrina Evans, who accused him of rape, said: ‘It’s the cruellest, coldest act for a victim. It’s a no-man’s-land between innocence and guilt. It’s cruel for everybody.’

  I texted Audrey: I can’t find a single not proven crime where I don’t think the defendant did it.

  Her reply came immediately.

  I know, it said.

  30

  I slept early and dreamt of Dominic Hull. I got up in the night, fresh from a dream about him falling down a rickety set of stairs in a made-up house, and I typed his name into Facebook.

  His profile was open. It was full of tributes. People writing missing you and hope you’re having fun up there, mate. I scrolled to the bottom of them, back to 2010, when his own updates began. Just like that, from dead to alive with the scroll of a mouse.

  I don’t know what I had expected to see in his updates. Rants about people and drama, maybe. Gloating about robbing people. Or nothing. Facebook games or poorly written updates.

  I didn’t expect what I found: pithy, witty updates, all in rhyme.

  You see me in the Job Centre,

  Don’t know I’m writing my journals.

  You didn’t know I could rap like this,

  My Tupac rhyming internals.

  I scrolled down. They were almost poetic in places.

  The evening pavement looked red tonight,

  Why didn’t you come to hold me tight?

  I moved on to his photos. He was posing, his biceps out, a cigarette in his mouth, in many. But he always had a notebook with him. A small one. Brown and battered. A biro clipped to its side. He was a writer, I guessed. And he might have been a burglar and a bully, but he was something else, too. His was a life filled with the things that were important to him. His family, his friends. His rhymes that scores of his Facebook friends liked.

  I moved on to his parents next. Their profiles were open. They were campaigners, that much was clear. Not only for the removal of the defence of reasonable force, but also for the abolition of the not proven verdict itself, though they never seemed to mention Jack or the case specifically. They said the verdict increased uncertainty. They’d created petitions and Kickstarter projects for getting rid of it. I guessed that was why Jack’s atrocity had reared its head again. They were lobbying the Scottish Parliament.

  They tagged their deceased son in every update.

  I was looking at their loss, their private tragedy, and yet I didn’t shy away from doing it. It was all public, and that – somehow – seemed to make it alright.

  There would have been a funeral. The coffin might have been white. He was a child, after all. Just like my patient; my boy.

  Jack sent me a text while I was lying in bed trying to fall back to sleep. It was a selfie. It would have been sexy, the darkness around him, his shoulders tensed, were it not for the affected, self-aware pout, the ubiquitous peace sign favoured by Instagram users. I couldn’t help but laugh at it, enjoyed seeing those dark eyes almost in real time.

  He followed it up with a message: any better than Facebook photos? Then he rang me, straight after – once he’d seen I’d read it, I suppose.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. His voice was deep, somehow carrying with it the rounded, thick, silent Oban air. ‘It’s crap being like this.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Together, but, you know. Awkward. Not mates. Not best friends.’

  ‘We’re still friends,’ I said with a soft laugh. ‘It’s all just been a shock. That you’d been lying to me.’

  And that was the only opportunity I gave him to tell me. I should have given him more, like setting rat traps. See if he told me. But I didn’t.

  ‘I’ve read more,’ I said. ‘You weren’t found not guilty.’

  Jack paused. It was infinitesimal, but it was there. And it was significant. Like the hesitation before pressing the brake when a pedestrian crosses in front of your car, or arriving on a platform just as the train doors are closing. Small but significant; life-changing.

  ‘It was not proven,’ I said. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What do you mean, “yeah”?’

  My eyes had been closed, lying in my bed, and I opened them again. Everything was where it was, before all of this happened. My cotton curtains that failed to block out the city lights. My neat bedspread. The Hippocratic Oath on my wall, engraved on a metal hanging. But everything had changed. Again.

  ‘Well – there are three verdicts in Scotland.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s not a big deal, Rach. They’re both not guilty.’

  ‘Really?’

  Jack heaved a sigh; a sad sigh. A loaded sigh. I didn’t mind, though: that part was real. ‘It means nothing. I don’t know – everything.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said, wanting him to go on, praying he wasn’t about to be notified that somebody had ordered the transcript of his trial.

  ‘It means there was significant doubt about your innocence,’ I said.

  To my surprise, Jack laughed. ‘Yeah, I’d say so,’ he said. ‘Hence the trial.’

  The laughter was piercing in its inappropriateness.

  ‘Why was it not proven?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ he said. His voice was musing. ‘I wonder if it was policy.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, I was scared. They said self-defence thresholds are lower when you’re being … invaded. When you’re scared.’

  ‘Yes,’ I murmured, and for the first time I felt a little glimmer of sympathy, like the first rays of sunlight in the morning, or a firework going off in the distance, its twinkles visible through spindly autumn trees. It would be scary to be repeatedly burgled.

  I tried to imagine, lying there in my flat, how I would feel if I heard the door thud downstairs. Adrenaline would fill my system. Maybe I’d confront them. And then we would be rowing, fighting. Signs of a struggle. Who knew what I would do? Can anybody ever really say?

  ‘They wanted to acquit me. But it’s never right to kill someone. No matter how unlucky you were. Or how often they’d burgled you. So they thought, we’ll get him off, but make him look culpable. To send a message to the public. I don’t know. I don’t know, Rach. Please don’t … I love you. I promise I can make you happy. We’ll be so happy together. Please don’t …’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? You swore – you swore it was all.’

  ‘Because … because I didn’t want you to doubt me,’ he said sadly.

  ‘How do I know you’re telling the truth now? You could be lying, still.’

  He didn’t say anything to that, except, ‘I’m sorry.’ Another sorry.

  We talked for a while longer.

  I looked out, down at the street, and saw a bald man with an earring wearing a Newcastle United football shirt – a Grade A Geordie, Jack would call him. In the Wok Bar, during a quiet moment, one of the chefs started sweeping up, wea
ring checked trousers and a pair of headphones.

  ‘How’s Wally?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’ve been to the bloody walk-in centre and I feel like a twat,’ he said.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Lorn. Don’t laugh,’ he said. ‘It was actually really scary.’ His voice was soft.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I had really sharp pains in my side. My right side.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ring me?’

  ‘Because I knew you’d tell me not to go.’

  ‘Where on your side?’

  ‘Above my hip bone. In the soft bit.’

  ‘So you had right iliac fossa pain and you thought you had appendicitis,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I thought it had ruptured, actually.’

  ‘Believe me, you would know if it had ruptured.’ The words tripped off my tongue, and there was something lovely in how unconscious they were. Medicine was still there, inside me. ‘Did it stop as you stood up?’ I said.

  ‘It got better, yeah.’

  ‘I could have told you on that basis alone that it wasn’t appendicitis. Its primary feature is that you can’t stand up straight.’

  I was still on the phone to him, but, in my head, we were in a consulting room. I could smell the tang of the bleach and see the computer with its Y and N keys rubbed clear of their lettering. He’d be lying on the bed, answering my questions, and I wouldn’t be looking at the clock, or trying to stop myself checking the Huffington Post until lunchtime, or rewarding myself with biscuits for finishing a batch of typing. I’d be completely lost in it. In that juncture where the science, the examination, met the art – the patient’s interpretation of their own symptoms. Their pain would be filtered through the lens of their experience. One person’s ten out of ten was another person’s four. I missed it so much, in that moment, that I closed my eyes and wished as hard as I had ever wished in my entire life that I could go back. Not to medicine, but through time.

  ‘But – right-sided pain,’ Jack said.

  ‘Appendicitis can present on either side, you know. It’s just slightly more common on the right.’

  I was assaulted by memories of medicine as I said it. Of trying to help people. It occurred to me that fear wasn’t a good enough excuse for what Jack had done. I’d been scared too: when young people wouldn’t respond to CPR. When I saw elderly patients go white and thin and we’d have to move them to the hospice. When people receiving chemo got colds. I’d tried to help them, when I was scared. I hadn’t done what he’d done.

  ‘So what did they diagnose you with?’ I said, trying to ignore my thoughts about him.

  Jack went silent for a second. ‘Trapped wind.’

  I could hear the humiliation in his voice, and couldn’t hide a smirk. ‘Prescription for Imodium and a fart?’ I said.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  We fell silent for a while. I could hear his breathing. It reminded me of lying next to him, in his arms, feeling his torso warm against my back, feeling so happy with him. So safe.

  I thought of the boy, ever present in my mind. ‘Do you dream of him – Dominic? I dream, sometimes … of patients I lost.’

  It was the closest I’d ever come to discussing the boy with Jack. I’d been too convincing with my moaning about long hours, a failing NHS, the litigation culture we were forced to work in. He’d never once asked me straight out why I’d left. He trusted me.

  ‘Dream?’ he said. ‘No.’

  I frowned then, but I was drifting off to sleep, the phone warm against my ear, and couldn’t analyse my emotions fully. ‘No?’ I said sleepily.

  ‘No,’ Jack said again.

  We hung up a few minutes later.

  31

  One year ago

  ‘It could be years, that’s what he said,’ the boy said happily. ‘Years and years. Decades. He said it hardly changes anything. People could be hit by a bus, he said. Nobody knows how long they’ve got.’

  I smiled politely as I walked across his room. He was running another fever, was being kept in overnight. It was dusky outside. His window was flung open, even though it was winter. His last, I was sure. I had looked at his Twitter account again. He had been upbeat. It had been nice to see, but bitter-sweet, too. Because he was wrong.

  ‘But now,’ he said, looking at me, ‘I want to know what you think. Not some general oncology consultant who’s never treated me.’

  The words couldn’t be clearer. We were alone. He knew the score.

  ‘I’m not sure I’d want to know,’ I lied, ‘if I were in your shoes.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re not dying,’ he said.

  He blinked, swallowed, and I could see a sheen on his eyes. I’d never seen him cry. Not once. Until then.

  ‘I can feel it, you know,’ he said. He drew a hand to his chest. ‘I can bloody feel it. Cancer on my chest. It’s heavy. I want to know when the end is.’

  It was a stance I entirely agreed with. If I could, I would have to know.

  ‘That’s a huge question. Why don’t you think about it?’ I said. ‘We’ll chat to your mum and that consultant, and we’ll all get together and discuss what’s best for you.’

  ‘How about you and I just discuss what’s best for me – here and now?’ he said. ‘Let’s not wait until I get to eighteen to discuss whether or not I’ll see eighteen.’

  He was so eloquent like that. He could have gone on to do anything. Maths, science, English. He could’ve been a writer, a doctor, a lawyer.

  ‘You know that I can’t say anything without your mum here – and without her consent,’ I said. ‘You’re –’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m a minor and you’re a major. Right.’

  ‘I could lose my job if I told you.’

  ‘More than your job’s worth.’

  I didn’t say anything to that. He was always good at getting to me; asking probing questions during chemotherapy. Treating me like a person and not a doctor.

  His voice softened. ‘Rach, I need to know when the ride’s going to stop. I can’t enjoy it, otherwise. I feel like I’m going mad. I’m living this.’ He paused and swallowed hard. ‘Even if it’s not as positive as what the consultant said. I want to know. It’s better for me to know.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Please tell me.’

  ‘You know I can’t. Your mum’s decision … it stands.’

  ‘But … I won’t tell her.’ His tone was pleading. ‘I just want to know the median prognosis. Just to plan my life. Relax a bit, if it’s years. Get things in order, if it’s months. Write some blogs, letters to people. Decide on my funeral music. I deserve to know. It’s my body. It’s me.’ He laughed self-consciously. ‘It’s me, not you.’

  He was staring at me, and finally I met his gaze. Outside, the air was dark but the sky was still light, illuminated.

  ‘Why don’t you sleep on it?’ he said.

  32

  Present day

  Dad met me and Kate at a cafe around the corner from him, for our Tuesday tradition that week, though he hated it there. He was obsessed with their staffing – There are seven people here and only four of them are ever doing anything! – and their pretension – Why would you buy a lovely space and then hang forty mirrors on the wall? – but we met there, anyway. It made us laugh.

  ‘I must say,’ Dad remarked, ‘it’s kind of nice now you’re both less high-flying. Though your mum wouldn’t approve.’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ Kate said, but she was smiling. ‘She really wouldn’t.’

  It felt good to laugh a bit about it. To be honest about it. How we felt. To not let death shroud our memories of her with loaded meanings.

  Kate extended her leg out in front of her. She was still in her sports gear, but the coaching days were only as long as the daylight, so she was done by five o’clock at the moment. As for me, I was always done by five o’clock, now.

  ‘We’d go months, sometimes,’ Dad said. ‘When you were both
busier.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and, for all I missed medicine, I was glad in that moment that he wasn’t alone any more.

  ‘Rach will go back,’ Kate said.

  Dad turned his owl-like eyes to me. ‘Will you?’ he said in surprise.

  He knew more than most, about the boy. Less than Amrit and my colleagues, but more than most. More than Kate.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. I can’t see myself going back. No.’

  And then I got a feeling I sometimes got when I remembered what had happened. Like putting on a cardigan of fear. Goosebumps across my back as I remembered the last time I saw the boy, and everything that followed afterwards. I shivered in the ambient cafe light.

  ‘I’ll order,’ Kate said. ‘At the bar. Sundaes?’

  I nodded, unable to say anything.

  ‘I thought it was all bound up with Mum,’ Dad said. ‘Seeing someone have cancer. Your first time bearing all the responsibility. Your first cure as a registrar.’

  I was touched.

  ‘All by yourself, I mean. And so soon after.’

  ‘Mum?’ I echoed.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just thought that it must have been hard, treating someone with cancer by yourself. Spending loads of time with him. Watching him go through what Mum had. It was hard hearing it.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So I just thought maybe you should talk to somebody about it.’

  ‘I don’t need to,’ I said.

  A copper lamp was swaying above his head and he looked around him. ‘This place is stupid,’ he said. ‘This lamp could bloody injure me.’

  ‘But she wasn’t … she wasn’t quite Mum. Afterwards.’

  We’d all had to rethink her, in those weeks that followed. I still didn’t understand it. Sometimes I wished Dad hadn’t told us. That he’d kept the affair to himself.

  ‘Isn’t that loss, too?’ he said. He shrugged sadly, his shoulders inhaling and exhaling slowly. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘But with the boy so soon after, and then splitting up with Ben … it’s been so much change for you.’