Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  And, just like that, his right hand drifted down and settled on my knee. Tickling, pleasurable: that’s how it felt. Like my whole knee was happy, radiating right around my body.

  We sat, both of us cross-legged, looking at each other.

  Jack continued. ‘I remember the Christmas lights were up, and Aldridge was standing right in front of a really bright sign, and I couldn’t see his eyes. I didn’t say anything. And, in the end, I never told anyone. And neither did Aldridge, obviously.’

  ‘Why not? Isn’t that provocation? The police might have understood.’

  ‘What – that I shot someone because they’d intimated something about my younger brother? If anything, that would’ve made things worse. You don’t know how it was. The police, they really didn’t care at all. Provocation wouldn’t have been a full defence. And they would’ve denied it … it was just – it was impossible. The whole family used each other as alibis, so nobody ever got convicted of anything. They had it all sewn up and if it ever got to a trial, the juries believed them. So much so that they could say stuff like that to us, in the street.’

  ‘So then what?’

  ‘So then I made a plan. That night I’d leave the door open. Not just ajar. Fully open. Mum and Dad went away that day. Davey was upstairs, otherwise engaged. I’d leave it open that night, I thought, and sort them out. Threaten them.’

  I waited, but Jack didn’t say anything for a few minutes. I could hear his breathing. It was deep and even. He’d stopped crying, though his hands were still shaking.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s hard for me to … to relive it. It was the day my life changed forever. Was made worse – forever.’

  ‘Not forever,’ I said softly. ‘It doesn’t have to be.’

  We stared at each other for a few seconds. His eyes were on mine, but they were calm. Not flitting around. Not lying, maybe.

  We moved to the sofa.

  ‘I wasn’t afraid of them,’ Jack said, settling back.

  He took his shoes off, slipping them off at the heel with the other foot. It was nice, that. He felt at home. He was wearing the ginger cat socks.

  ‘I never thought they’d hurt me. What I was afraid of was that it would carry on that way forever. Always being robbed – over and over. Our home not really being our own. Davey being afraid of them and, I don’t know, abused. That was the fear.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘So I opened the door. The most obvious door. I’ll show you one day, if you like. It was high up on a hill.’

  ‘I’ve seen a photo.’

  ‘Of course you have,’ he said, but he said it with a tiny smile. ‘Well, it was obvious that the door was open. I sat …’ He stopped, thinking. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, looking at me. ‘This is what I did: that day, after I saw them – it was dark at four o’clock up there – I turned the far room light on. We called it the snug. Put the TV on. I went outside, down the bottom of the hill, and I checked. You could see it. You could see the light. From outside.’

  I frowned, not following.

  He misinterpreted me, reaching for me. ‘I never thought it would happen. You make a stupid plan. You just step outside. The very first step of the plan. The first point along the way. But then, when I was out there, looking, I saw them. They wore these … like headtorch lamps. Like people wear to bloody car boots. At first I thought I was imagining it, it was just a flash in the dark. But then I saw it again. It was getting closer. And then it was happening, my plan.’

  ‘Your plan?’

  He inhaled, then breathed out again, pausing. ‘I trapped them,’ he said. His voice broke. ‘I went from a normal bloke in a shit situation to … I don’t know. A monster. A bloody monster.’

  My hands had gone cold. ‘You trapped them?’

  ‘Not like that. But I made it so they would definitely walk past me. And I could frighten them. There was a corridor. From the conservatory, where the door was open, all along the house, to the stairs. I knew they’d go that way. They’d think I was in the snug, right at the very back. So I waited. In the dark. In that corridor that I knew they’d come along. I waited. Holding the gun.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘They arrived. After less than five minutes. I remember thinking to myself: I can’t believe this is bloody happening. It was just a stupid plan. But it worked. Well – not in the end, obviously. They crept past me. Dominic was running, excited. I turned the light on – there was a lamp, by the chair, in the corridor – and I said, “If you take another step, I’ll shoot.” ’

  ‘You said that?’ I felt frozen. Started shivering.

  ‘Oh no, no,’ he said, seeing my expression change. ‘I didn’t – I never intended. Jesus. I just wanted to scare them.’ He looked at me again, then rolled his eyes. ‘I know how that sounds. But I was bloody desperate, Rach. It sounds mad,’ he said, sitting forward, becoming more animated, ‘but I didn’t even consider the danger of it. How it might end. I was in charge, and I wasn’t going to shoot anyone. I didn’t even know that it was already a crime to threaten someone in that way. I just thought I’d wait for them and hold the gun and I’d scare them off. They were only young – young lads. We all were. I so wanted to sort it, before my parents came back. Tell them it was over.’

  ‘I knew,’ I said. ‘You told the story wrong. You said they threw something at you and then you said they were still holding it.’

  ‘I know. I was telling you lies. I didn’t want you to know I’d lured them in. I slipped up.’

  ‘But what went wrong? With your plan?’

  ‘They were like, recruiting him. Training him. He was sixteen. Aldridge had said this was his first burglary. They chose me, that night, because it was easy, even when the door was locked. That’s what Aldridge said. They were angry when they realized I’d been lying in wait. The energy was just so confrontational. And I couldn’t stop thinking about what Aldridge had said about Davey. They stopped. Stock-still. Dominic called me crazy. That was – that was the last thing he said. His last word … they turned around, back down the corridor. They got to the conservatory. They were almost out. Aldridge sprinted off. So Dominic was on his own.’

  I closed my eyes. Please, don’t have shot him when he was leaving, please no.

  ‘Part of the problem was that I was already nervous. Holding the bloody gun. Pointing at them. It was trained on them as they were leaving. I’d never held a gun and pointed it at someone. Never. I didn’t know how I’d got there. And then. Well. That’s when it happened.’

  ‘What?’ my voice was hoarse.

  ‘Dominic – he … he turned. Twitched, towards me. Just a tiny bit. And the expression on his face was demonic. Mocking.’

  ‘Did you lose it? Get angry?’

  ‘I thought he was going to lunge for me,’ he said, looking at me imploringly, his eyebrows raised. ‘But it’s true that there was no struggle,’ he said, visibly deflating in front of me, like a pool of hot wax on my sofa.

  ‘Did you intend to kill him?’ I said.

  ‘I remember thinking it was all lost, that it would be this way forever, that Davey would be scared forever and not want to take the bins out – remember how he loves that? And then I just shot. That’s the truth of it. The months of agony and intrusion all mounted up, and suddenly I could see a way out. And then I just pulled the trigger. There was no struggle. No statue,’ he said sadly. ‘That was my story in court. And, later, for you. But I placed the statue in his hand after I’d killed him, when I realized there was no evidence he was going to go for me. So his fingerprints were on it. And I’d been aiming for his temple. I wish I hadn’t been. But I was.’

  51

  I stared into my lap. Desperate. He was desperate. Just like the boy had been. Looking for a way out in all the wrong places.

  ‘Do you regret it?’ I said.

  Jack’s head snapped up. ‘Every. Single. Day.’

  I nodded. That was enough for me. No matter what our morals, our views, our vocations – we all
made mistakes.

  ‘I thought you were going to tell me that Davey had done it. That you’d taken the blame for him.’

  Jack shook his head again. ‘No. No, that’s not what happened,’ he said. ‘But … what was traumatic – other than literally ending someone’s life, of course,’ he said, and then he gulped and started crying again, ‘was that I didn’t know myself. Every night after it, when I went to bed, it was like there was a stranger with me. I didn’t know my morals. What I was capable of.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve been there.’

  He looked up at me. ‘Have you?’

  ‘I didn’t leave medicine because of Jeremy Hunt or the NHS or the hours or the pay,’ I said. ‘I left because I made a massive, massive mistake.’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  His eyes were wary. I could see why. All that time I’d been on his case, reading about him, so obsessed with his crime, as though I was perfect myself. And here I was, months on, finally telling him that I wasn’t.

  ‘I told a teenage patient of mine his prognosis, against his mum’s wishes. I knew him very well, but it wasn’t the right call, because he was a minor and volatile. I told him he actually had months, not years. And I told him how he’d die. And then he hanged himself. After our conversation.’

  Jack paused, looking at me. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘The boy.’

  ‘Yes. The boy.’

  ‘You talk about him in your sleep sometimes. Elijah. I didn’t want to ask …’

  That made me cry, right then. He hadn’t pressed me about my crime. Because he was good.

  ‘Yes. Elijah.’

  ‘Well, who am I to talk?’ he said. ‘It’s hardly the same as what I did.’

  ‘Sometimes it feels as though it is,’ I said.

  And I could feel every muscle in my body relaxing. My deltoids. My rectus abdominis. My glutes. I was right to have trusted him. He was reasonable. Level-headed. He wasn’t using the boy as an excuse to storm out, to claim I hadn’t been straight with him, when he could have. He was a decent person. With me.

  ‘I’m so sorry for all of the … the hacking,’ I said. ‘That’s not me. At all. I was just, I don’t know. Desperate to know you. The things I did …’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to know. That’s why I left, though,’ he added. ‘Because I didn’t know you. I just didn’t know you. I hadn’t known you long enough. So you were invading my privacy and making me tell you stuff and I didn’t know if that was you being you or you acting out of character. I didn’t have any context for you. I needed to have a million moments with you before I knew you were … good.’

  ‘Likewise,’ I said. ‘I was trying to have those moments by reading about you. I should have just – God. Just got to know you. Slowly. I was rushing because Wally was on his way and everything felt so urgent. But I should have just calmed down. Trusted you. No, not trusted you. Trusted that you would tell me.’

  ‘You never said anything at all,’ he said. ‘About Elijah.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I just …’

  And that was as far as we got. My sentence trailed off.

  We were quiet for a while.

  ‘So,’ Jack said.

  ‘So.’

  I finally knew. He’d told me everything, I was sure of it. It was obvious. In his shaking hands, his tears, his openness. His admission that he’d been wrong. He was finally being honest. I could see that.

  The worst had been revealed.

  The prosecution had been correct. Jack had lured the lads there. And he had intended to shoot. There had been no struggle; no defence in law. He’d aimed. He should have been found guilty, not ‘not proven’. He was a murderer, in those very specific circumstances, and he’d lied about it. Invented a struggle. But was he bad? He would never do anything like that again, of that I was certain. Not only because he wouldn’t be forced into those horrible circumstances again, but because he had learnt his lesson. Should he have been sent to prison for life? He’d taken one, so maybe. But who would it have benefitted?

  And even though the worst had happened, that seemed almost beside the point. He had told me the truth, and I trusted him. And that mattered more than the past, the crime, the intention.

  ‘You know now,’ he’d said. ‘Mum, Dad and, I suppose, Davey know. We agreed I would lie in court. But other than us – nobody else knows.’

  I liked that ‘us’.

  Later, I told him about the aftermath of the boy, his funeral, how I had left things with work. He told me that Hull’s parents had tried to challenge the law of double jeopardy, which was when his lawyer Gavin texted him. They’d failed; their final appeal.

  He told me that he was relearning to drive, that he’d managed to have a beer recently. We talked about whether he had ever considered not calling 999, hiding Dominic’s body. He said no; was appalled by that.

  He showed me what was in the blue box. It was full of articles. He proffered them to me. He said I could read them, but I didn’t need to. They were his.

  Private.

  ‘You can look whenever you like,’ he told me.

  ‘I don’t need to,’ I said, though I was happy he had offered; that he had let me in. ‘Where was it?’

  ‘I brought it down with me from Scotland. I don’t know why. I can’t get rid of them. It’s funny, isn’t it? We’ve paid thousands of pounds to get rid of everything on the Internet. We’ve changed our names. But I can’t bear to part with this little box. It’s like I will have learnt nothing if I throw it out. I need it.’

  ‘Where was it, though?’

  ‘In my wardrobe. I thought you’d find it – that day I made you take me to that cafe. What a dickhead,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I was just so scared, if you were in my house on your own, you’d find things. On my computer. In my house. I knew you had doubts. I thought you’d look.’

  I shrugged. ‘I might have,’ I said.

  ‘So when I woke up and remembered the meeting, I pretended I was late – so that you’d drive me. I actually sat there for forty minutes on my own, after you’d dropped me off, feeling like a tosser. You looked so tired and pale in the car. Who makes their pregnant girlfriend do that?’

  ‘A twat,’ I said, but I grinned.

  And then he turned to me on the sofa, so close to me, just looking at me. Then he reached over and, so gently, removed a strand of hair from my face.

  And neither of us was scared any more.

  52

  We were in bed with Howard on a Saturday morning when it began. A dull backache.

  I took a paracetamol, turned to Jack, and said, ‘Pregnancy takes your waist, your slim ankles and, finally, your back.’

  ‘It’s weird, it’s coming and going,’ I said, later, to him.

  We were both reading. Howard was lying between us on his back.

  ‘This might be our last quiet Saturday,’ Jack said, turning to me and putting White Teeth down on the bed.

  I was a week overdue.

  ‘No way – next week, Wally will be just there,’ I said, indicating the middle of the bed. ‘Next to Howard. And we’ll have to tell Howard what it means to be a big brother. But it’ll still be quiet.’

  Jack smiled, his eyes widening, lightening. He reached to touch Howard’s belly. Slowly. Howard never liked that, was minded to clamp all four paws around any intruding hand.

  ‘You’re going to have a baby brother or sister,’ Jack said to Howard. ‘But Mummy and Daddy love you just the same.’

  ‘You’re supposed to get the older sibling a symbolic present,’ I said.

  ‘What do you think he’d like – a ceremonial Waitrose meal?’

  ‘Definitely,’ I said, stretching and wincing as my back seized up again. ‘Meat and jelly are his true loves.’

  ‘Coming and going, did you say?’ Jack said.

  ‘Oh no, I’ve alerted the hypochondriac,’ I said, waving a hand and shifting myself up to a sitting position. ‘Ignore me.’
/>   ‘Coming and going like in waves?’ he said. ‘Like, maybe, a contraction?’

  ‘I … I … oh,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you were the doctor,’ he said.

  ‘I totally am,’ I said, flashing him a smile.

  Another contraction gripped me, radiating around from my back and sides and to my stomach.

  ‘Wally’s imminent,’ I said.

  ‘Shit,’ Jack said. ‘Are we having a baby?’

  ‘We very much are,’ I said.

  I grabbed his arm, happier than I’d ever felt in my entire life, even mid-contraction.

  ‘I wonder if they can give me some Valium?’ Jack said as we sat up in bed together.

  I swatted his arm, laughing, unable to stop myself.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘We’ve got ages.’

  Jack turned to me, his eyebrows raised. ‘Don’t we need to dash out now?’ he said.

  ‘Nah. Wait. Wait until they’re a few minutes apart. They’ll only send me away.’

  ‘Really?’ Jack said. His eyes were wide. ‘But you’re – you know. In labour. It’s dangerous.’

  I laughed softly. ‘I’m going for a bath,’ I said, walking naked across the hallway and starting it running.

  My steps felt heavier. I was unused to this new, stretched circumference of mine, how easily I bumped into doorframes and how often my own elbows brushed my protruding stomach. I couldn’t reach down to get things in the shower. I could bend a few inches, and then I’d get stuck. It was strange, that time, that weird body.

  I’d moved into Jack’s Newcastle house. He’d gone permanent with City Lights. He’d stopped freelancing, got up at 7.30 a.m. every morning. We’d put curtains up, finally. I’d taken control of the thermostat.

  ‘Howie missed you,’ Jack said, bringing him into the bathroom.

  Howard looked disgruntled, his orange brow furred.

  ‘He missed his night-time routine.’

  ‘And I missed Howie,’ I said.

  My voice had changed. It was high-pitched again. Happy. I was back with Jack, and a doctor again; a combination I’d never before experienced. Jack would text me during my shifts: funny memes he wanted me to read, interesting articles about medical ethics, anxious medical questions. I read them all and smilingly answered over a cup of tea and a KitKat on my break. He’d be cooking when I got home, Howard brushing around his legs.