White Lies (25 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

I must have passed out on the sofa. I wake at midday and Clare is gone and my flat is a shithole and my phone is full of messages.

Sarah: asking if I want to meet up after work later for a drink, which I was not expecting at all after standing her up for a concussion last night.

Clare: telling me to go fuck myself, which I was definitely expecting and probably deserve. I should go fuck myself and she’s moving out.

Third one’s the charm.

Angela: half begging, half demanding that I visit my dad this morning because he’s gone and done something really fucking stupid.

I drive one-handed, picking chunks of congealed blood out of the back of my head to keep myself awake. The B-roads run through tree-lined tunnels and on a clear day the sun strobes through the branches. I always miss the turning. A sign in the shape of a chicken, hidden in a hedge, is the only indication that a narrow dirt road veers off round a blind corner. I take the turn too sharply and my tyres freewheel on the gravel. The car park is half empty, half full, depending on how depressed you are.

The receptionist non-smiles politely as I push through the double doors. I nod, pointing towards my dad’s corridor with questioning eyebrows. She shakes her head and jerks a thumb in the direction of the common room.

The residents cluster around the telly like it’s a cold fire. Grey rain batters against the windows - an all-consuming white noise that puts me slightly off balance. No-one looks up when I walk through the doorway. A glossy gold paper chain flutters down from the mantelpiece without a single reaction. A nurse squeezes past me with a fresh catheter bag, followed by a porter in rubber gloves carrying a bucket of soapy water. They are ignored too.

And there in the corner I spy, with my tired, jealous eyes, a father who is asleep. Well, at least I won’t have to talk to him.

“There you are!” Every shoulder in the room twitches but this one’s for me. It’s the duty manager for Dad’s corridor. Hannah? Helen? No, something odder. I meet her halfway across the room. She continues to shout, even though we’re standing a foot apart. Her name badge reads ‘Honour’.

“I’ve been looking for you!”

“My dad’s asleep. Is Angela around? She asked me to come in.”

Honour lies with no attempt at grace, “Angela’s busy with a resident at the moment. I just need to have a quick word with you if you don’t mind.” She looks me up and down, taking note of the abrasions on my face, the awkward stance that keeps me off my sore leg. She doesn’t look impressed.

Honour heads off towards Dad’s room and I follow with sickly anticipation. Why the hell does she want to talk to me? The staff either pity me or flick disdainful glances at me for not visiting my dad enough. I’m just the idiot son. Angela knows all the technical stuff and the money stuff and the medical stuff and the emotional stuff. All I do is come in once a week to tell Dad that Alex is dead. The one thing Angela can’t do.

“It’s not like an old death,” Angie told me. She’s had enough of them. She’s been ready for Dad to die since the moment she co-signed the home’s application form with me. Her face slipped for a second and then recalibrated into something more solid than before - a face beyond her face that could not be touched by what was inside.

“With Alex… When it happens like that, with no warning. It’s like being shaken.” Her face was not controlled, then. She sat across from me in the hospital canteen and her eyes twitched, squinting like she was looking into the sun. The tightness of her mouth pushed new lines into her skin. Her hands would not leave her alone, scratching at imaginary itches, pulling on strands of hair until they snapped out of her skull, rubbing across her eyelids until lashes came away on her fingertips. At the funeral her expression contorted into a cry with no sound, no breath. And now there’s just the flinching. Every mention of her little brother’s name is an open-handed strike. Thinking of Dad’s predictable death must feel like a relief.

The woman in the room across from Dad sits so upright it looks unnatural. I watch her until the door closes behind me and I can be sure she’s not about to leap out of bed, baring fangs. Honour lowers her voice once we’re safely inside Dad’s room, now that there is no-one to overhear.

“There was an incident yesterday,” she says. “I don’t know if Angela told you.”

It’s happening again. Another stroke. He’s been losing the power of sensible speech for months. My lungs tense to half their capacity. “What happened?”

“Well. As far as we can tell, Peter got hold of something he shouldn’t have.”

Shit. He tried to top himself. What with? A knife? Pills? Shoelaces? The thought weighs like stones in my stomach. My voice becomes paper thin, creeping up high, past the massive swelling that has suddenly appeared in my throat. “What happened?”

“Another resident believes he may have been… on some sort of non-prescription drugs.”

“What?” Seriously? I’m smiling and I can’t help it.

She pauses disapprovingly. “Recreational drugs, I mean. Marijuana, maybe.”

“Where did he get it from?”

She looks at me predominantly with her left eye, as if it is the more judgemental of the two.

I laugh. “I have not given my dad any weed.” I have to sit down. Honour is glaring. “And neither has Angela.” My face is stuck in a rictus grin. I am not helping, I can tell.

“That isn’t the only incident that occurred yesterday,” she continues, and it gets better. I don’t mean to laugh, I mean, I really don’t. She tells me about Paul and the fork and Dad falling sweetly asleep afterwards and not remembering a thing. I bite the insides of my cheeks until the flesh makes a crunching sound. They’re worried about sudden deterioration, a stroke gone unnoticed, severe changes in personality, violence, aggression, depression, drug abuse. But oh my God my dad got stoned and stabbed an old man with a fork.

Honour folds her hands into her apron. “We haven’t found any evidence. Yet. But I need to let you know that we take possession of illegal drugs very seriously. If we were to come across any proof, we would have to ask him to leave.”

I force my face into a frown. “Yes, of course.”

“But because your sister - ”

“Stepsister.” God, shut up, shut up, you moron.

“Because your stepsister is a member of staff, I am willing to let you… have a little check yourself, before we search his room thoroughly.” The left eye is protruding again, this time accompanied by a bouncing eyebrow. She’s trying to be subtle. I nod slowly to let her know I’m in on the game.

“Thank you.”

“Let’s just hope it doesn’t happen again.”

“It won’t, I promise.”

She gives a curt nod in reply and swishes from the room. I close the door behind her and rest my head against the lacquered wood. His bed looks the type that would swallow you whole with its orthopaedic mattress and layers and layers of bedding. I could lie down – for just a moment – if I don’t sleep soon I might go on a forking rampage of my own. My jaw is so tense I cannot unclench it. Ulcers have sprouted all along my gum line.

Fuck, it’s hot in here. I swing the window open and try to focus. I need to sweep my way through his room before he wakes up. I don’t want to get caught up in that confrontation. Right. Wardrobe: clean. Chest of drawers: clean. Miscellaneous boxes of photos and my grandfather’s military insignia: clean. Shoes: clean. I consider my dad’s level of sneakiness and check the hems of his curtains and the top of his wardrobe: clean. Drawers under the bed: clean. Ah.
Behind
the drawers under the bed: a shoebox. It rattles and shuffles when shaken. I pull it out amidst a wave of dust-sneezes. Inside: pills. Pills? Has he been hiding his meds? A dusty little bag of skunk. I pocket it. It’s sweet and plump and strong. Dad, you cheeky bastard.

But my smile reverses when I see what lies at the bottom of the box.

Letters. Signed
Heather
.

#

I’m gone before Angela’s finished dealing with her patient, before Dad wakes up, before I put my head through a wall. I’m gone without the letters and I’m driving without really focusing my eyes properly.

My phone has been ringing since I left but I shut it into the glove compartment and let it buzz itself stupid. It’s almost three o’clock. Sarah gets off early on a Friday. She wants to meet in the park by the council offices. The sky looks like snow gone to slush - a dirty wash over the sun, flat and unromantic. There are no shadows. In the park, people jog along the paths leaving no trace on the ground, the trees are just trees, the pavement just grey.

I wait on a wet bench and the cold seeps into my damaged hip, my knee, the back of my head where the stitches pull tight as the skin knits together. Behind closed eyes, my mother’s signature has been burned onto my retinas. My dad’s lies. The dates on the envelopes spread over weeks, months after she left. No wonder he wants to die. Then he can leave all his confessions in a neat little letter of his own. Like my mother. Like Lydia.

And there’s the difference. Alex had his letter and he was going to do something about it. I finally reach my pot of gold and I put it back where I found it. I’ve spent so many years burying her inside soft, glutinous guilt, fabricating solutions and justifications that would explain thirty-five years of silence, I can’t risk finding out that she just didn’t want me. Alex watched his mother die, internalising it into night terrors - cold, tormented feet kicking me awake whenever he crawled into my bed. Fighting something, or trying to get away, but always clinging, hanging on my pyjama sleeves for dear life. Sometimes I’d kick him back. His mother was dying and I’d kick him out of the bed onto the floor where he’d thrash until the chilled air woke him with a whimper.

When Lydia was ill, our job was to stay quiet in the house and help with the housework. When she moved into the hospital the same rules applied: be quiet, clean and tidy. Smile. Don’t talk too much.

Alex was ten when she died. Her absence trapped him like a rat in a box, running a loop of mad, frantic terror; wound so tight that when it gets free all it can do is go straight for your face. I can barely remember him before.

The sun dips below the terraced houses at the edge of the park. There’s a police depot on the west side. A high slanted chain-link fence guards a fleet of police cars parked in neat, toyish lines. Alex would have climbed it, just to say he’d been inside. He was the friend I wished I’d had. Before I went off to uni he’d creep in after his curfew and sit on the floor next to my bed, swaying with adrenaline and whatever cocktail of drugs and alcohol he had in his belly. He’d tell me all the things he and Jamie had done: exploring the derelict petrol station, climbing up the high rise fire escapes and getting drunk on the roof, chasing girls into the churchyard and getting groped for their trouble. “You should’ve been there,” he would whisper breathlessly.

And I would roll my eyes at him. I would make him feel stupid. I would make him hate me. He was my Frankenstein’s monster.

I can’t wait for Sarah. I haul myself off the bench, stiff and limping worse than ever, down towards the bleeding sunset sky, towards the fence that I’m going to fucking climb because it’s there and it’s staring at me and it’s what I should have done years ago with my little shit of a brother.

#

My feet are too big to fit safely into the diamond holes of the wire fence. My hands grip onto the chains like determined claws, but halfway up my hip starts to throb, and I realise my muscles, atrophied by laziness, will be tired out before I reach the top of the fence.

“Matt?”

I look down and almost slip. Sarah watches me from the darkness of the park. I can’t see her face clearly but I see now she’s far too young, too likely to pity me and think it’s love.

“What are you doing? Get down!” She adds a laugh but it’s not genuine.

I ignore her, haul myself up over the swaying fence top, legs dangling free for a moment, twelve feet off the ground.

“Fucking hell, be careful.”

“Shhhhhh,” I hiss back, craning over my shoulder into the floodlit depot but there’s no-one there. I imagine letting go, dropping down to the concrete, hearing my ankles crack on impact. I take the descent too fast, arms screeching with my weight, leaping down in an ungainly abseil, a few feet at a time. The wire shakes and rattles, far too loud, and my skin flushes with low-standard pride.

“Seriously, Matt, what are you doing?” Sarah whispers, pressing herself up against the other side of the fence.

When I reach the ground it feels as if it is swaying. “I have no idea,” I tell her. She beckons me over and draws breath over her teeth when she sees my bruised face.

“Poor baby.”

Maybe she’s not too young. Maybe I’m not too old. I just climbed a fucking fence, didn’t I?

For a second, Sarah looks like she wants to kiss me. Then her eyes flick to something behind me and a woman’s voice yells, “Oi!”

A policewoman crosses the car park at a run and Sarah yelps. I jump at the fence and start to climb, scared clumsiness making it twice as difficult this time. The policewoman reaches me in slow motion and grabs the back of my jeans, jerking me backwards and off the fence. I land on her legs and she grunts. I am too sleep-deprived to operate on anything but adrenaline and I twist around to pin her flat against the ground.