White Lies (21 page)

Someone’s crying – or trying to cry silently, at least – and I recognise the sniffing. A girl, my girl, little Clare, grown up Clare, still a child really Clare, different Clare. Something wrong. She crouches next to my chair and rests her head on the back of my casted arm.

“Hello,” I whisper. I can’t be sure she’s really there, after all, and the last thing I need is to look like I’m talking to myself.

Her head whips up, hair sticking to her wet face like whiskers. “Grandad.”

“Hello, Pickle.”

She smiles, a slowly creaking door left on the latch, unsure whether to let this stranger in. “What’s my name?” she asks me.

“Scary Clare,” I tell her, because she never wanted to be a passive little princess. She knew the dragon got to have more fun.

She nods, twists a bracelet around and around her wrist. I can feel her foot jerking up and down in impatience through the carpet. She doesn’t want to be here. Why is she here? Something different in the way she stands. Something new working away behind her eyes.

“I’m scared,” she says quietly. “I can’t talk to my mum.” She looks up and down the corridor. “She’s not in today. I checked.”

And I see. I know. She has that look on her face – the same look her grandmother had when she was pregnant – a bizarre mix of serenity and unease.

Darling granddaughter,

find a sucker just like me

to help you raise it.

I shake my head. “Just like your mother. And hers. How long do you sirens go back?” She straightens up at my change of tone, disappearing into a distorted silhouette against the hard sunlight behind her and I can see three generations of Sutton women, round-bellied and tired with heaviness, lined up in front of the window, beauteously terrifying and full of power. The light overexposes them, makes me leer, blinking, but there they are, all the same. Lydia with her head to one side, mocking, adoring and ready to give me a slap for being so nostalgic; Angela standing solemn and unblinking, reproving of my self-indulgence; Clare, nervous and furious and wishing she was still small enough to cuddle up and watch
Top Gear
with me, chewing our way through a packet of Liquorice Allsorts.

She would be alright, I knew. Her mother would be shocked, then accepting, then give all the advice I wished I’d had on hand to give Angela nearly twenty years ago. Why do they come to me? What can I possibly offer them?

The three figures bloom into ink blots against the sheer curtains, melting and deforming until they are as twisted and broken as my Mother Whistler. It is their turn to leer. They have come for me, for the things I have hidden. I scramble to stand, treasure clamped to my chest, pushing away the hands that try to grab me as I slip on the wet carpet underfoot. The flood has passed but my feet will sink into the ground if I stay still for too long.

#

I stumble over a threshold into a body drenched in sweat, adrenaline usurping my blood. My hands are white, trembling beyond my control, beyond hiding. Angela didn’t have time to suck on the gas canister that they’d wheeled in. I am glad, because the mouthpiece is dimpled with the teeth-marks of other screaming women. She’d barely got inside the room when a flurry of peach-scrubbed staff descended upon her, hands on her head, her belly, between her legs.

Each contraction begins with a fearful and dread-filled curling of her toes, a rolling forward of her shoulders, a bracing of her palms on the bed’s side-bars. A noise rises from her like an air raid warning, cyclical and mechanical. She sustains a perfect note for so long I cannot believe she has enough air in her lungs to hold it so steady. Her belly tightens and stands out rigid while she gulps in a breath and the note lifts a few tones, increases its volume, tails off with an upward flick as she tops the peak. What follows is a series of moans too sexual for me to bear to listen to, then a satisfied sigh. I blush every time, even though each one makes me want to cry with pride, with fear, with incomprehension at her strength. How does she know? How can she do this? How can any woman have done this before her?

In my ears her sounds become Heather’s terrified pleas, Lydia’s low, guttural lowing. Something agonising is yanked out of me with every cry. I force myself to listen to Angela’s interpretation, to watch sweat peel from her pores and mingle into a pool between her collarbones. The midwife has a grin on her face now, the nurse too. Angela manages a weak, breathy smile in between contractions, squeezes my hand, nods when the midwife says, “Soon, keep going, honey.”

The room descends into a sudden rush of action as Angela’s eyes bulge with shock and a stream of negatives spring from her mouth, while the midwife reassures her and everyone sets their eyes on her vagina, except me, who won’t even allow myself a prudent glance.

Everyone pulls together – a bloody and agonising Hokey Cokey – while Angela pushes with every vein in her face and holds her breath for longer than is humanly possible. I know this, because I try to hold mine with her, and fail.

“Again!” the midwife yells.

Angela pushes silently. I hear splattering on the floor, a deep exhalation.

“There’s the head. Wait. Waaaaait. One more!” My eyes flick automatically to the disembodied little red face protruding from her crotch.

Angela shrieks and a slithering body follows, a boneless thing covered in grey slime, one hand grasping its cord, squeezing rhythmically. It takes a moment to adjust to the cold, bright world, reacts with disappointment and outrage. I smile so hard my cheeks hurt, through eyes full of tears, at the little face which seems to be mostly made up of one huge screaming mouth. The nurses whip a towel around it and place the baby gently onto Angela’s chest.

She doesn’t speak, the baby doesn’t cry. They look at each other. Angela kisses its gunky forehead, streaking blood onto her cheek. As one, the onlookers sway and breathe and swallow the lumps in our throats and the midwife whispers, “Girl.”

Angela considers the tiny head rooting for her breasts.

“Clare,” she says.

#

I can hear her but I can’t see her. Can’t find her. Can’t breathe. Can’t keep going but can’t stop moving. Door. Wall. Floor. Something sharp against my ribs. A fork in my fist. And I hear her voice but I see his face. So many times I wanted to hurt him.

“Peter, let me help you,” he says.

“Graham,” I say.

“Paul,” he says. Lies. From the start.

“You,” I say. Simpler that way.

My wrist throbs inside its cast. I let him pull me up off the carpet since I don’t know how I came to be lying there, and halfway to standing I take my chance. The fork tines pierce his polyester slacks, his fatless thigh, and stick into stringy muscle. He cries out. Falls. And me with him, back down into the ocean again. My head glances off a doorframe and a girl calls my name but this isn’t a portal, this is rest.

Chapter Seventeen

I’m only out for a minute or two. I’d sidestepped like a startled seagull, but not far enough to stop the front right corner of the bus from barrelling into my left hip (“I just nudged him,” the driver claimed). The impact spun me backwards, perfectly in line for the wing mirror to crack into the back of my head. Another ‘nudge’ that split the plastic.

Sound and vision melt back into my head, taking begrudged turns as if I am trying to mix oil and water.

“Don’t move him!”

“Idiot was in the middle of the road… ”

“I’m a witness, I’m a witness. Has someone called the police?”

“Police? He needs an ambulance, look at his head.”

“What’s your name?”

I realise my eyes are open and Lee Burnett is looming over me, a wad of tissues pressed to a fat, split lip, but genuine concern in his eyes. The buzzing in my brain makes me forget that it was Alex who got the letter about Dad and not me, and for a moment the man looking down at me could be my own alternate father. One who might give a shit if his son got hit by a bus.

“What’s your name?” he says again.

“Matthew.”

“Can you move?”

A blush heats my face and I want to cry. My eyes cartwheel, checking that Jamie is not part of the growing crowd. Thank fuck for that.

I grasp blindly for his hands, my depth perception somewhere far off and happy in its ignorance. “I’m so sorry, Lee. I honestly didn’t know he was going to hit you.”

Lee laughs, throwing his head back like a jovial musketeer, only without the flowing hair. “Don’t worry about me. Can you get up? You’re still in the road.”

A car passes too close, blasting out a baseline that jumps octaves without warning. The beat settles in my stomach and when I sit up I think I’m going to puke.

Lee quickly takes my arm and pulls me, limping, over to the curb so the bus can pull in to the side of the road, letting off a double-deckerload of inquisitive, irritated and irate passengers who take up residence on the opposite side of the street to stare at me.

“Ambulance is coming,” the waitress informs us, iPhone to her ear, a strange smile aimed my way.

I count in my head until the siren comes veering around the corner but the numerical order gets lost. I am stuck on seventeen.

Lee dabs at his lip and peers at the tissue to see if his blood has clotted yet.

The paramedic looks us both up and down. “Right, who first?”

In the back of the ambulance they pull at my clothes and ask me why I’m fighting them and I am forced to yell, “No! I’m - I’m - I’m going commando!”

The paramedic pauses, Lee stifles a laugh, the driver says, “What?”

I explain in a whisper, “I had no clean pants this morning.”

“Well, we still need to have a look at that leg, mate.”

“Please - it’s okay, just a bruise. Really.”

“I’ll close my eyes,” Lee says patiently, patting my shoulder. The lump on my head bulges through my hair. It pounds with every heartbeat. Each time I reach up to feel the thick congealed blood, the paramedic tuts at me and slaps my hand away.

Lee shuts his eyes and rests his hands over them. The paramedic lays a sheet of paper towelling over my crotch and cuts away my left jean-leg.

When I was younger I always dreamed about being in some sort of accident - nothing too bad, just enough to warrant a sling, or crutches, or a head bandage. The worst I managed was a sprained ankle when I was twelve, missing a step coming out of a chapel assembly. In fact, shoved by Jamie. Laughed at by Alex. Reluctantly acknowledged by Dad, who only took me to the doctor after it turned black and I couldn’t fit my shoe on.

This is not what I dreamed of.

The paramedic’s rubber-gloved hands are tacky and drag on my leg-hair. My balls shrink inside my body with shame beneath the pathetic modesty of paper towel.

Hands press my skin. A tongue clicks. My hip is already blotching purple. There’s no sweetness of a day-old surface bruise. It’s deep. An ache that twists my lower intestine. I don’t know what I was expecting.

The paramedic looks up, “Lie back. You need stitches for your head. Maybe an x-ray for this leg.”

I nod. No, that was a stupid idea. I shake my head. Equally bad. “I just need to get home,” I try. His response is to ping off his gloves.

The ambulance takes a right on a roundabout and I throw up over the side of the gurney, splattering the shoes of Alex’s real dad.

#

In A&E I cower in a fold-up wheelchair, clutch my paper towel blanket, and tell Lee repeatedly to go back to his bar, to go home, to leave me here. He ignores me, tells me stories about weird bar customers, the strange things he’s found in his restaurant toilets, the idiots he’s employed over the years. He manages this for a good hour before he mentions her name, then barrels in with no warning:

“Was Lydia sure Alex was mine?”

I feel like a betrayer to my father even saying it aloud. “She never even talked about it. Alex just got this letter.” And I remember I have the very thing – the earth-shattering, equilibrium-destroying object itself – in my pocket. I hold it out to him. “Here.”

I can’t read it again. I won’t. It’s actually, bizarrely, pleasantly, none of my business now that Alex is no longer a blood relation of mine. Lee reads it, chewing on his inflamed lip. His Alex-eyes squint at some of the words as if they hurt. When he’s finished he sighs long and low, and because you might as well kick someone while they’re down, I tell him how his son died. Lee bobs his head rhythmically and empty of expression as he listens. I run out of words when I get to the funeral so he ends it by clearing his throat and trying to pass the letter back.“Keep it,” I say, more bitterly than I mean to.

“He was your brother.”

He
was
my half-brother. Now I suppose he was my stepbrother. Though really, now he’s dead, he’s nothing to no-one. I nod all the same.

“Who was the other one?” Lee asks, “The one who hit me?”

“Alex’s best friend. He’s a prick. Sorry.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Stop apologising.”

He’s too calm. His ability to deal with all this shit is as irritating as it is reassuring. “You’ve taken all this pretty well,” I say.