Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  He looked over at me. ‘Welcome back,’ he said simply. ‘I knew you’d come.’

  46

  One year ago

  I wasn’t called to his room. There was no crash call or loud buzzer. No warning sign at all. I just went to see him, later that night, for no reason other than to look in, to spend time with him, to make sure he was okay. To check, maybe, that he’d managed to get some sleep.

  I could say I knew as I approached his room, but I didn’t. The truth is, I had no idea.

  I was walking at full pace when I opened his door. I was prepared with a one-liner about how he should be reading War and Peace, not YA books, to improve his vocabulary to beat me in Scrabble.

  I opened the door, and stopped dead.

  He’d used a Newcastle United scarf, the one he always had with him.

  He was hanging. There from the television frame, a puddle of urine beneath him.

  The circus had begun around me. The consultant was called in. He’d been sleeping, was puffy-eyed as he arrived. The nurses stood around, shivering, as the consultant examined him. And, of course, the boy’s mum was called in.

  ‘There’ll be an inquest, won’t there?’ one of the nurses said to me.

  I was standing, separated from them all, alone in a corner, in the darkest part of the room, looking at the aftermath. The scarf. The television arm that I’d adjusted. The floor being mopped. I wasn’t looking at his body, which had been placed back on the bed as if he was still alive.

  I could hear the boy’s mum in the corridor. I turned away, towards the wall, folding my arms in on myself. It was the worst moment of my entire life.

  ‘What’s happened, what’s happening?’ she was saying. ‘Let me in there,’ she shouted.

  Daniel, the consultant, stopped examining the boy, gave me a curt look, and went to the door. I was supposed to go with him. Oh, how could I go, how could I face her and tell her what I’d done?

  ‘There was a note,’ the consultant said to me in a low voice.

  ‘Was there?’ Instinctively, I reached my hand out.

  But he looked at me. ‘For her,’ he said, a quizzical look crossing his features.

  She was out in the corridor, standing alone, a handbag clasped between her fingers, swaying slightly as she held it, the bag almost touching the floor. I closed my eyes, a slow blink, and braced myself.

  ‘We need to have a word in a room,’ Daniel said.

  ‘What’s happening? Where is he? Is he alright? He was running a fever, but he was fine, we played Minesweeper.’

  ‘Let’s step in here,’ Daniel said.

  I had to admire his composure. Next to him, I was shaking violently.

  She looked at us, expectantly, her eyes glassy, and I saw then that she knew already. Only she was trying not to know. She daren’t know.

  ‘I’m very, very sorry –’ Daniel began.

  Her features collapsed in on themselves before he could finish.

  I bit a fingernail, looking away. I couldn’t handle it.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘How? How?’

  I held my body tight, as though that could stem her emotions, as Daniel dealt the blow.

  ‘I’m very sorry to say he took his own life. Last night. In the night,’ Daniel said. ‘I’m so very, very sorry.’

  At first she said nothing. Her face remained the same. And then she coughed, making a kind of choking noise. And then she covered her face with her hands and screamed, just like he had, in my office.

  My mind arced back over it. His tattoo. Throwing that paperweight. Quoting Marx at me like he was an adult. But really, he was pretending. He didn’t have capacity. He was immature. Volatile. Not ready. I should have kept him in denial. Been less brutal in my honesty. My gut instincts had been wrong. Totally incorrect. Catastrophically incorrect. I had killed him. My hands may have been clean, free of blood, but I had killed that boy. It had been me.

  My face became hot as I stood, then sat back down again. Daniel looked at me, irritated.

  The mother turned to me, blinking in disbelief. And then she said it. Putting together her child’s death and my reaction to it. ‘You told him,’ she said. Her voice was quiet, but her gaze was locked on to mine.

  I couldn’t do anything but tell the truth. ‘Yes,’ I said. I wanted to add that I was sorry, that I had been wrong, but I couldn’t.

  She looked away from me. ‘Why?’ she said, still looking at the window. ‘I told you … I told you not to.’

  ‘Told him what?’ Daniel said.

  ‘His prognosis.’

  His brow creased. ‘How did you know his prognosis?’

  ‘I told him what I knew.’

  ‘But those would be guesses. Cancer is so unpredictable.’

  The boy’s mum’s wails got louder, at that.

  Daniel’s face closed down. ‘We need to speak alone,’ he said to me, raising his eyebrows. He was dismissing me, I saw.

  I got up to leave, hovering at the door, waiting for closure, but the boy’s mum wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘I did everything I could for him,’ I said, my voice thick. ‘Everything for his cancer. Everything in his … what I thought were his best interests.’

  ‘Well, you were wrong. Look what he did …’ She paused. ‘How?’

  Daniel understood immediately. He was far better than me at subtext, at understanding people. ‘He hanged himself. I’m very sorry.’

  I left then. It wasn’t right to, but it wouldn’t have been right to stay, either.

  And it wasn’t right to tell the boy, but I’m not sure it would have been right to keep lying to him. Nothing worked in those situations. Nothing was right.

  Shortly after the boy’s mum went in to see him, Daniel suspended me. I didn’t see him until the inquest, where I was examined and cross-examined by a snobby barrister.

  My last words to Daniel, as I left, as I was wrenched away from my patients, were, ‘Make sure Maisie in bed three sees the monkey on your stethoscope when you’re doing her obs. She likes it. It helps her.’

  47

  Present day

  We sat on the tarmac of the car park in the cold November night.

  ‘What’re you going to do?’ Amrit said. He had new trainers on; they were a bright white.

  ‘What? Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you can’t go on creeping around hospital car parks,’ he said.

  I turned to him. He was leaning back on his hands, looking up at the sky.

  ‘I just missed it.’ I thought about Jack as Amrit sat silently next to me. I was just like Jack. A vigilante, thinking the laws of medical ethics didn’t apply to me. But were either of us bad? I wasn’t. I had meant well. But I’d messed up.

  And had I been honest with him about my past, either? I hadn’t, of course. And Jack wasn’t digging around in my emails.

  I winced at the thought. It was never okay to invade somebody’s privacy like that. I had, somehow, discounted that in my desperation to find out the truth. But it was wrong. Totally wrong. My cheeks burned with the shame of it.

  I kept looking at the little window opposite, where it had happened, almost expecting to see the boy rise up against it. Or Dominic Hull. Reaching a hand up to knock, notebook in the other hand.

  They could have been the same boy. They were around the same age. They even looked alike: a shock of dark hair, that goofy way of standing slightly slouched over.

  I picked up a small stone from the surface of the car park and rolled it around before letting it fall through my fingers. Everything was such a tangled mess. Who knew what was right or wrong any more?

  I turned to Amrit. ‘Jack and I have split up. I just felt like I wanted to be here. Home.’

  ‘Medicine isn’t a choice,’ Amrit said. ‘It’s a calling, isn’t it? And it’s trying to get a response out of you. It’s not going to take no for an answer.’

  ‘But what should I do?’ I said, turning to him, one of the only people who knew. ‘I can’t come back.�
�

  ‘Why not?’ he said softly. ‘You made a mistake. Jesus, we all do it. Remember when I loaded up that woman’s driver with three times the lethal dose of morphine?’

  ‘That’s poor maths,’ I said. ‘This was wilful. Besides, we double-checked yours. Just in time.’ I picked up the stone again from the surface of the car park, scoured a shape on the ground with it. My belly was stretched against my top, like a giant orb sitting right in front of me. ‘I basically killed him.’

  ‘It wasn’t wilful,’ he said. ‘People understand … yes, you intended, in the moment, to do something, but it can still be a mistake. Nobody thinks badly of you, Rach. You resigned before they could even tell you that.’

  I dropped the little stone again. It rolled a few inches away from me, just out of reach. I thought of Jack, holding that gun. Could that have been a mistake, too? And could I understand it, even though my entire career had been spent fixing bodies, not injuring them?

  I didn’t know. But I could learn how to forgive. Starting with myself.

  ‘The inquest – the lawyers’ questioning. That conclusion. The coroner read out exactly what happened. What I did. What the boy did. The Trust’s lawyers said the CPS might do something.’

  ‘But they didn’t. Nor did the GMC. You shouldn’t do it again – don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘Not like that. Not in such an impulsive way. But you’re needed. Good doctors always are.’

  ‘I don’t know if I could do it again,’ I said. ‘If I could come back and not freeze.’

  And that’s when I started to cry, big, fat tears. I’d hardly cried as an adult. Medicine had dried my tears up for me. It was hard to cry about normal things when you’d seen the things we had.

  ‘I loved that boy,’ I said softly through my tears.

  Amrit put his arm around my shoulders, scooting closer to me. He smelt of disinfectant, the tang of alcohol gel just evaporated off his skin.

  ‘My first death was hell,’ he said. ‘Do you remember after it? He was a baby. Called Sam. He was miniature. But perfect. Totally perfect. There was no reason for it. He wasn’t really very premature. Placental abruption. He came out – he slithered out – white. Not moving. I knew then. We worked on him, with him, for forty-five minutes, and the entire time his mother was screaming and screaming. I went outside afterwards. Headbutted a lamp post. I had a huge bruise. It’s thankless, this job. Never in any other job do you see how unfair the world is – how meaningless, and how meaningful, all at once.’

  ‘I remember Sam,’ I said. I remembered all the deaths, but especially the babies. ‘His parents had another baby the next year, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yeah, they did,’ Amrit said.

  ‘How can I go back?’ I said.

  Amrit didn’t look surprised that I was asking. Instead, he said, ‘How can you not?’

  ‘But if I did want to be a doctor again …’

  ‘Be? You never stopped.’

  ‘No?’ I said.

  ‘No. It’s not something you do. It’s something you are.’

  I couldn’t help but smile at that.

  ‘You care too much,’ Amrit added.

  I half smiled. Ben had said the same. It was true.

  That was another way of looking at it. Maybe I wasn’t nosy. Maybe I was misguided. Maybe I cared too much about people. About healing them. Solving them. The boy. Jack. Even Ben. Atoning for the boy with my own child. Atoning for Mum with the boy. Mum’s affair had made me paranoid that Ben would cheat on me, but there was something about me, native me, underneath all that. Maybe it was caring too much. Maybe it was being too inquisitive. Sleuthing too much. Overanalysing. Not respecting boundaries. Not being able to impose them on myself. Maybe that investigative quality had made me a better doctor, and a worse one, all at once. What did it matter? I had learnt my lesson now. No more. No more privacy invasions.

  ‘Audrey cheated on me,’ Amrit said after a few minutes.

  I looked sideways at him.

  ‘At uni,’ he added. ‘Early on.’

  I didn’t say anything. One of the worst things about finding out something awful was finding out everybody else either knew or suspected.

  ‘I wish it hadn’t happened. It’s a blight on everything. But what can you do? You just have to keep buggering on,’ he said with a soft laugh.

  ‘Did she tell you?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘He did. Bastard.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘But it’s weird when the most perfect thing in your life has such a stain on it. I get it,’ he said, looking at me. ‘But it doesn’t mean you run away. You keep on. You go back.’

  ‘Maybe I will,’ I said softly.

  ‘You know the note they discussed at the inquest, though. You know what it said.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, remembering.

  ITEM 17

  Don’t blame anyone but the cancer. I’m just taking back control, like Hume once said: the power of acting or of not acting; the determination of the will.

  I’ll always love you all.

  ‘His mum came in again. Later. Much later. After the inquest. She mentioned you. I’ve been trying to tell you,’ Amrit said.

  I thought back to his texts and calls. ‘Oh.’

  ‘She seems philosophical now. She knows you meant no malice.’

  ‘She hates me.’

  ‘Maybe. You did her out of a goodbye. But she knows. She knows now that he would have died, anyway. That he – evidently – preferred to go this way.’

  ‘Hanging would have been a horrible death,’ I said, trying not to cry. ‘I bet he regretted it. That’s why he wet himself. The fear. He couldn’t take it back once he’d kicked the visitor’s chair away. He regretted it. He acted on impulse. Like a child.’

  ‘No, Rach, no,’ Amrit murmured, but then he stopped speaking, and just sat next to me and looked at the sky.

  And that, somehow, was enough.

  But then, I had changed my perspective – from adamant I was doing the right thing to certainty that I hadn’t, and the knowledge that, with hindsight, of course I wouldn’t do it again – and so maybe she had, too. We all rewrite our own narratives constantly. How we see things. Tragedies and successes. They change, like shifting sands, when viewed from different points in our lives. Look at Jack. Look at Kate. Look at me.

  Jack had stepped in for Davey, being overprotective of him in the face of the burglaries. And so had the mother for her boy. And so had I for the boy, in a different way. We were all partly acting for other people, and maybe we were all wrong.

  ‘How many tragedies do we all cause in a lifetime?’ Amrit said, as though reading my mind.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Loads. Some are just more obvious than others.’ He’d always been so wise, Amrit. When he wasn’t wisecracking about labour and drinking fizzy drinks. I had forgotten how much I liked him.

  I thought of Jack, churned up by the legal system, and then I thought of myself. We were both at fault, for sure. Both the main causative force in our victim’s death. Both equally sinister. A doctor going against a child’s parent’s wishes. A man lying in wait for a burglar. I shivered.

  The truth was, I realized with a start, it wasn’t Jack I didn’t trust. It was myself. After everything. Mum. Ben. The boy. And now Jack. And, when you don’t trust yourself, you can’t trust anybody else, either.

  48

  I liked to talk to Mez about the break-up. Kate gave me space, quietly disappearing whenever I went over there. Mez and I went on a walk, one wintery Sunday afternoon in December, to Jesmond Dene Park. It smelt heady, of mouldering leaves and peat and the earth being replenished.

  Mez bought me a latte, in an older brother sort of way, declining the gingerbread syrup. ‘Apparently, it’s Christmas,’ he said, handing it to me.

  ‘Seems so,’ I said, and my stomach lurched at that. Soon it would be the next year, and Wally would be almost here.

  I was quietly ready. I had a Moses b
asket next to my bed. I kept reminding myself that I would just take it one day at a time, that it would be fine, but I didn’t need the reminders, not really.

  But it was the other stuff that was weighing me down, the businesslike texts I received from Jack about plans for the birth and upcoming scans. They were the worst. Where previously I’d had a whole raft of Jack-ness to enjoy – his humour, his kisses, even his cat – I now had only a few polite, sparsely worded text messages. Instead of looking at his body language, his facial expressions, I inspected the double spaces after his full stops – a grammar rule he would defend to his death.

  His texts said things like hope you’re feeling well and let me know if anything changes.

  I was like a spectre in my own flat, wandering around, unable to settle to anything. I still imagined him kissing me late at night, when I was in the bath.

  ‘How is Mr Ross?’ Mez said.

  ‘I don’t know. Seems fine. Back in Oban a bit more,’ I said. ‘But he’s still under contract for City Lights.’

  ‘What about Wally?’ Mez kicked up a leaf with his Converse trainer.

  I brushed my stomach with my hand. It was tight, like a fully blown-up balloon. It was strange to think of a baby nestled in amongst my organs. I couldn’t quite imagine it.

  ‘I don’t know …’ I said. ‘We need to talk about it.’

  But, of course, we couldn’t communicate enough to have a relationship. How could we surmount the most difficult of communication tasks: post-break-up civility? Co-parenting a child? It wasn’t as if we didn’t have the back story, the emotions, the love, either. Late at night, I still cried as I remembered the best bits – the day we met, our first date – and all the moments surrounding those, like firework clusters.

  I had so many memories for such a short relationship. Not the usual stuff that I’d had with Ben: shirts hanging in wardrobes, a pair of snow boots in the loft, a joint bank account. Jack and I had other things. More poignant things, I thought. The way the light looked on the Tyne Bridge the night we first kissed, our mouths tasting of garlic and pasta. The Howard-shaped hole at the foot of my bed. The gap in my morning routine as I would usually log on to read his latest tweets. The places where his body belonged: his fingers around mine in bed, the absence of his firm chest against my back as I slept. How he never seemed to ask anything of me. How he never got worried about Wally and how we’d cope. How he never asked me about leaving medicine. How he never expected me to have a better job. I couldn’t even go near the Monument; I would avoid that route, even if it meant walking much further.