Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘You should sort it,’ Mez said. ‘Even Kate and I would struggle with that. But you have to sort it.’

  ‘Even you and Kate,’ I said, but I was smiling. ‘All good again?’

  ‘Yes. I apologized. Shame Jack can’t.’

  ‘He has apologized.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s not that. I trust him not to be a dick. He’ll make it easy. I know he will.’

  I trusted him to be reasonable. To be nice. To be kind. Of course I did. Every action of his was imbued with those qualities. The way he prepared my dinner sometimes and brought my plate first, complete with a drink. The way he had been careful with his reaction to the positive pregnancy test, because he knew I would remember it forever. The way he wrote about feminism and pitched the articles to the Independent, even though they never took them. The way he never missed a vaccination for Howard. That he wanted the best for Wally. He was good in so many, many ways.

  Hadn’t I thought, outside the hospital, that neither of us was bad? We’d been in extreme situations, that was all. And though the Hippocratic Oath hung on my wall, did it always apply? Couldn’t people make mistakes? And yes, sometimes those mistakes would be catastrophic. Like mine, like Jack’s. But what if I’d been so intent on understanding what Jack had done, trying to excuse it, that I had missed the obvious thing? That I had to simply accept it, and then forgive it. For the sake of Wally. For our future parenting.

  ‘You trust him to be a good co-parent?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Not just that. I trust him – completely. To be good.’

  The words were out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying. But I did trust him, I realized. I knew him to be good. He regretted what he had done. He would never, ever have committed a crime if he hadn’t been pushed into that situation. It was a one-off. That much was obvious. Or maybe, the truth was that I had decided to trust Jack.

  ‘You trust Jack?’ Mez said, lowering his coffee slowly from his mouth.

  His eyes were on me. His hair was rumpled, shining blue-black in the weak winter sun.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  It wasn’t a state of mind. It wasn’t something that was or wasn’t: it was a decision. We should have worked on it. It wasn’t something to be solved by me hacking into his emails, but something that could have happened with time, and with experience.

  ‘If you trust Jack,’ Mez said, echoing my thoughts, ‘then what are you doing here without him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said to Mez. ‘I have no idea at all.’

  I went to Mum’s grave that night. I recognized her headstone as I would have recognized her across a crowded room: immediately.

  I told her everything, sitting in the cold and talking until my voice was hoarse. I told her about her own death. How I’d seen her wither and crumple until she seemed to disappear against the pillows. I told her about the days afterwards. I told her it used to hurt my feelings when she mocked me.

  And I thought she understood. Apologized, even.

  I told her how nice it was when she rang me regularly. That she cared.

  I thought she understood that, too.

  I told her about Ben. About the things I’d accused him of. Incorrectly, probably, though I would never know for sure. And then I told her about the boy. About the mistake I’d made.

  I could almost see her. Her eyes so like mine, her body language tense and coiled as it had always been, listening intently.

  ‘Don’t worry about Ben,’ she would say. ‘You would’ve broken up, anyway.’

  Before I left, I closed my eyes and imagined how it would be if I saw Ben again now. I’d apologize. I’d try and explain that it hadn’t been personal. That it was about Mum’s death. That it was about the boy. I’d become paranoid from too much bad news and from my world – my parents, my career – shifting under my feet like quicksand.

  He’d get it, I thought. He’d always been logical. He’d empathize once he understood.

  I didn’t know what Mum would have said about the rest. It felt too tangled to unravel. But, as I left, I felt better about Ben. And solving one thing was better than nothing.

  49

  It took two forms, and one week, and there I was. I was more junior, here. Of course I was. The mistake, the time off, the switching of specialities: they’d all had repercussions. I was an F2 again and not a registrar. But I didn’t care. The NHS had taken me back like a loving mother, no questions asked, even though I was due to give birth in three months’ time.

  Dad had texted me this morning: good luck, he’d said. Mum would be proud. I’d blinked back tears. She would’ve been. I knew she would.

  The hospice had a different smell to hospitals. Drifts of roast dinners, of perfume, of the outside world. Less disinfectant, less medicine. I looked down at my scrubs; even the largest size they had was tight across my stomach. I fingered my stethoscope. The metal was cool against my throat.

  ‘Hi, James,’ I said to the lad in bed seven.

  He was lying down, looking out over the hospice’s gardens, which were full of topiary and fountains. I could hear the trickle of the water sometimes, when things were quiet, at night, or in the mid-afternoon slump. There were things hospitals didn’t have: bird feeders hanging up outside, a tuck box for the nurses. Unhygienic things, too, like cushions, and animals coming in to provide therapy. Everybody at the hospice knew the score; they’d come there to die. It wasn’t as depressing as I thought it might be. It was more peaceful than dying in a hospital. The drugs were for comfort, not brutal necessity.

  ‘That makes me need the bloody toilet,’ James said, indicating the water feature outside.

  He had cystic fibrosis. He’d always known his life might be short but, he hoped, meaningful. He was about other things, too, though. He liked M&M’s so much he went to M&M’s World in London. He was colour-blind. He liked playing hockey and the banjo.

  He was wearing faded jeans and a white T-shirt. I could see some chest hair appearing over the top of it. He’d only moved in yesterday. An iPad lay discarded on the bed.

  ‘I never thought it would be like this,’ he said.

  He was sitting cross-legged on the bed. He looked a little tired, slightly pale, but perfectly healthy. We’d run out of treatment, though. It wouldn’t be long.

  ‘Like what?’ I said with a smile.

  I looked at the clipboard hanging on the wall – not on the end of his bed. It wasn’t a hospital bed. It was wooden. It made all the difference.

  ‘Like, this reminds me of being at uni. There’s a pool table. It doesn’t smell of … the hospital smelt of death.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Palliative doesn’t mean end-of-life immediately. It means nice things.’

  I felt a pang again. Mum hadn’t had enough nice things. It had taken her too quickly.

  I’d never have wanted to work in a hospice a few years ago. But it was the juncture where painkillers met making people laugh, making them comfortable. Being there in their last moments, being at ultimate peace. Deciding when to treat and when to leave things. Being completely honest. Letting the patients be in control.

  But most of the time it wasn’t at all medical. It was a game of chess with a teenager who laughed so hard he doubled up. It was a walk in the grounds, talking about the latest episode of Homeland. It was bringing someone bacon and eggs because they fancied it and they’d been getting a bit thin.

  James pressed the home button on his iPad. It sprang to life. An email was waiting, previewed on the screen. Like that email I saw so many, many months ago. He looked up, and saw me staring.

  ‘What?’ he said with an amused smile.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  James looked at me, his brow wrinkling, a strange smile on his face. ‘What …?’ he said.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘You just reminded me of somebody I used to know. Of something that happened. Ages ago.’

  I handed him a cup with two pills in, and he necked them. I squirmed un
der his intense gaze.

  ‘Seems like somebody important,’ he said. ‘Tell me your secrets – I’m dying.’

  I laughed, a small laugh. ‘Don’t say that,’ I said.

  I had none of the ethical dilemmas I’d wrestled with when acting for a Trust, underneath a consultant. I could form all the relationships I wanted, here. It was encouraged.

  ‘Was he important?’

  ‘He was,’ I said.

  ‘Well, then. Got to do what you got to do,’ he said.

  ‘We were a bit too different in the end. Or maybe too similar. And, you know, timing,’ I said.

  And it was true. Our relationship couldn’t handle the experience of putting it on a conveyor belt moving too quickly. Not many relationships could. Our luggage had weighed us down on that baggage carousel, but it was the movement that threw us off.

  ‘It’s over,’ I said, raising my head to look at him.

  ‘You get one life, though. You know?’

  I took James’s blood pressure and stared out at the grounds of the hospice. The trees were moving slightly in the breeze.

  I’d had a hand in a patient’s suicide. Jack had shot a burglar he absolutely shouldn’t have. Our lives would have been easier if we’d done the other thing, at those junctures. Our actions had brought about catastrophic consequences.

  But what did we deserve? A distressing trial? A total career break?

  We’d made mistakes. We were human. What of the people who hadn’t been burgled repeatedly, or who hadn’t had to lie to a dying boy too many times already? We had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, Jack and I. We were all culpable. But only some of us were unlucky. If Jack hadn’t been burgled, he may never have hurt a fly. He wasn’t reckless, dangerous. I didn’t think so, anyway.

  They took one moment, those lawyers, the coroner who ran the inquest into the boy’s death, and built a whole picture around it, taking only the relevant – only the damning – parts of our lives, our stories, which fitted. They discarded the rest, like ripping out, blacking out, the edges of a painting.

  And they didn’t even know. They weren’t even there. They could only try to reconstruct what had happened. At best, it was a replica. A poor facsimile of the truth. They could call in experts on bullet trajectories and suicide notes and forced entry into a house and on advanced Ewing’s sarcoma. But they didn’t know. They weren’t there. They weren’t there when I made the decision to be honest with the boy, and they weren’t there when Jack made the split-second decision to shoot.

  Jack wasn’t there when I did it. And I wasn’t there when he did it.

  And all we could ever try to do was understand, and move forward, and forgive.

  He’d lured them there. But couldn’t I understand that? He’d intended to frighten them, to make it stop. What led up to it was desperation. He didn’t intend for it to all go wrong. He lost his temper. But not after a split second. After months of intrusion. Both of our acts had been premeditated. I’d slept on mine, after all.

  And besides, couldn’t I understand the qualities that Jack’s action represented? Anxiety, protectiveness? And even if I couldn’t understand those qualities, couldn’t I forgive them? Maybe. Maybe, if I really loved the person, maybe I could.

  ‘One life,’ I said to James.

  ‘Mine’s over. But yours ain’t, Rach,’ he said.

  ‘Rach, I like that,’ I said.

  The boy had been the only other patient who had ever called me that.

  James smiled at me, winked, and I left his room, moving on to my next patient.

  Trust. It was just trust. And forgiveness. I had realized too late, but at least I finally knew.

  50

  Two months later

  He didn’t ring the doorbell. He never did.

  I heard the noise in the hallway and was halfway across my cluttered lounge – filled with breast pumps, top-and-tail wash bowls and others things I did not even understand – when he opened the door himself.

  Jack’s bottom lip was wobbling like a child’s, and he raked his hair back with a shaking hand. It had grown long, his hair, and was curly at the ends, little ringlets. The back was tufty, sticking up, in that way that it always did.

  ‘I should have been convicted,’ he said. He sounded more Scottish than I remembered, his words almost indecipherable. ‘I am guilty. That’s what I’m hiding.’ He was holding a blue plastic box, and he gestured to it.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  And then his lip-trembling became more violent, and tears appeared in his eyes. I stepped back, alarmed, and trod on a pile of muslin cloths which littered the floor.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. Jack wiped a tear from his cheek with the heel of his hand.

  I turned off the medical podcast I was listening to. It was about the effects of caffeine on heart rate, and I didn’t want to worry Jack.

  I was trying to enjoy the rest of my alone time, reading books, watching seminal films I had somehow missed. But I wasn’t enjoying it at all. I was lonely. That was the problem. I couldn’t even grab an acquaintance and go and sit in a bar. The depressing judgemental looks were too much; I shouldn’t even be drinking lemonade in Lloyds Bar on Saturday nights. I should be enjoying cosy evenings with my husband, reading from the baby book, jokingly eating hot curries and pineapple and drinking raspberry-bloody-leaf tea.

  Audrey had been over a lot. She texted every day; almost hourly, sometimes. She told me about her new colleague. I suspect him of being a kidult, she wrote. He brings multipack Petits Filous in and puts them in the work fridge (???).

  She was forever making me laugh, but, like an ice block, my loneliness took hours to thaw, and I froze again as soon as the contact ceased.

  It wasn’t even the aloneness, exactly. I could cope with that. I’d been single before. No, it was the other stuff. That alongside my current predicament was another life where Jack and I had stayed together. Where we were the excited couple in John Lewis, the ones counting down nauseatingly on Facebook to the arrival of their due date. The ones who lost sleep, late at night, worrying as their lives were about to change forever.

  It was the comparison between me – alone, like a whale, in the bath on Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night – and how it should have been, laughing as Jack massaged my belly gently. That’s what upset me the most. I would never again be a woman pregnant with her firstborn. We’d robbed each other of the pure enjoyment of it – like Lee Aldridge and his mates, breaking in and stealing whatever they wished.

  Jack waved a hand, frustrated. ‘I lied in court. It’s worse than what you read.’ He thumped the box down on the carpet. Then, like a man who’d reached right inside himself and pulled a demon out, he leant forward, his elbows on his knees, and sobbed. ‘I so wanted it to be over,’ he said.

  I stood over him, not knowing what to say. It was just getting dark outside. Five minutes ago I hadn’t seen him for three months. And then, suddenly, he was there, in my living room. He stood up straight, then sat down unthinkingly on the birthing ball.

  ‘Why don’t you start from the beginning?’ I said gently, like he was a thick-file patient with a huge history.

  And it was just us in my dimly lit flat with the hum of the fridge across the room in my tiny kitchenette. A space in which to talk, no pressure, just the two of us. Nearly three.

  ‘It was a December night in Oban …’ he said.

  And there began his story. Not my own take on the press’s slant on it. Not cobbled together from his emails. But from him.

  ‘Davey was upstairs. I wanted to … I don’t know. I felt like his parent, some days. The break-ins upset him so much. I felt like I should act for him. To get rid of them. Like a lioness chasing off predators.’

  My throat felt tight. It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, I kept telling myself. We were broken up. Doomed, anyway. But it did matter. More than almost anything. And it would matter to Wally, too.

  ‘I saw them. Not Dominic. The others.
Aldridge. And his mum, Pauline. Earlier in the day. Just on the promenade, in the harbour.’ He waved behind him, as if we were standing right there in Oban. ‘Right by the boats, actually, you know where we …?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And he said something to me, about Davey.’

  ‘What?’ I said. I sat down on the floor, right in front of Jack, as if I was praying to him.

  Absent-mindedly, I thought, he reached out and touched my shoulder, just briefly. His index finger lingered there, for just a second.

  I looked up at Jack. My eyes ran over his dark red lips, his brown eyes, his messy, curly hair. He had a full beard again. I wondered if he was up against a writing deadline, or just sad, like I was.

  ‘Aldridge said he reckoned that, next time – he said it factually, like there definitely would be a next time – he thought he could get Davey to just pass him stuff. Because he’s …’

  He didn’t finish his sentence, and he didn’t need to. The sad thing was, Aldridge was probably right. Davey might have been persuaded to hand over his worldly possessions. And maybe that wouldn’t even have been a crime, I didn’t know. It was awful, that sentiment.

  ‘He said then we wouldn’t have an insurance claim. Because Davey would’ve given them away. Like gifts.’ Jack was crying again now, tears dripping on to his legs and on to the blue birthing ball he was sitting on. ‘I can’t bloody sit on this thing,’ he said, slithering down on to the floor next to me.