White Lies (13 page)

Dad has gone stock still, one hand on the door of the wardrobe, the other wrapped around a hanging trouser leg. You could almost believe he was listening, but I know better.

Graham promised he wouldn’t tell Dad about the smoking. He seemed to feel sorry for me and didn’t laugh when I told him what happened. He stood there afterwards for longer than seemed normal, watched me pretend I knew how to smoke in a cool way, idly scraped dried mud off a trowel. He suggested nail varnish remover to get the ink off, which, incidentally, is a fucking bad idea when applied to scrubbed-raw skin.

“So did you win?” Graham asked.

“Win what?”

“The race. The swimming.”

“Oh. No. Third.”

“Third? Third is good.”

“Yeah, well… ”

“Did you get a medal? A trophy?”

“Medal. And a certificate.”

“Something to remember it by.”

I scoffed. “Good memories.”

“You’ll laugh one day.”

“I think not.”

“Well. Laugh now then. You’ve got your revenge, it’s not worth being bitter about.”

I thought he was wise. And I felt like an adult talking to him, something that wasn’t possible around my dad. I was a perpetual tug on his sleeve. Always an intrusion.

“He said I looked like Mum,” I say, louder than is necessary to cross the small room. I want to hurt him. I want a reaction.

My dad sneezes again and wipes his nose on his sleeve. “Five years, and nothing,” he says, still facing the wardrobe. “That bastard next door.”

“What?”

“That wasn’t true. But she never sent
him
any letters.”

He’s talking about my mum, I know it. His voice changes when he speaks about her, as if he has to put on a different face to do so. My lungs sink into my stomach.

“Who? What letters?” I’m on my feet but I don’t remember standing up. He still won’t turn and look at me.

“Or maybe she did. Maybe he was laughing at me.” He goes very quiet and then starts sniffing. He better not be fucking crying. The fingers poking out of the end of his plaster cast form a gnarled fist.

“Dad?” Just fucking look at me. “Peter?” He controls himself with one extra-loud sniffle. “Peter,” I say again. “Did Mum - Did Heather write to you?”

Dad’s head jerks up and slightly to the side, as if hearing someone calling his name from another room. The only sound I can hear is the rhythmic suck and groan of the machine wired up to the old lady in the room opposite, and the off-key humming of his neighbour Ingrid. But Dad turns and heads towards the door, oblivious to my presence aside from having to manoeuvre past me, like I’m an inconvenient piece of furniture. I grab him by the shoulder – on his bad arm – and he hisses in pain but looks back at me blankly. There are tears on his face. I let him go.

“Dad?”

“Happy birthday, Matthew,” he says, and walks out into the corridor, wiping his eyes with his stump.

#

For a long time I didn’t even consider that it might have been hard for my dad. I truly believed, in some way, it was his fault that she’d disappeared. Something he’d done, some dark secret, some violent moment that had driven her away. I was terrified of him at times, not that I really knew why, other than not understanding how he could make his face into an expressionless mask whenever I asked him about my mum.

I lived at Nana Alice’s until I was three. He would visit daily after work to have dinner with us and sit in silence while Alice told him about our day. I sat muted, too. Unless she nudged me to add a detail of our thrilling activities: “And what did we pick from the garden for lunch?”

“Broad beans.”

“And Matthew podded them all, didn’t you little one?”

A nod from me. A nod of acknowledgement from Dad. Nana Alice would continue on, making up for the absent two-thirds of the conversation, talking until she had to stop and sigh in between sentences to catch her breath. Soon after that she’d declare that a cup of tea was needed and we would be gratefully disbanded; me to my room to play, Dad to the sofa to watch the news.

When I moved ‘home’ to Dad’s house I thought it was a punishment. It happened over a bank holiday and I was left to spend three whole days and nights alone with my father -awkward pauses paced between stuttered communication and a lot of TV. His cooking was comparable to Nana Alice’s like slurry is to fertiliser. When Nana Alice turned up on Tuesday morning to look after me while Dad went back to work, I hugged her leg so tightly I ripped a ladder in her tights. She set about making Dad’s house “a bit more liveable” - emptying the box of toys that had stayed packed away in the corner of my room, laying my mum’s favourite knitted blanket on my bed, making sure there was an obligatory crucifix in each room.

Nana Alice had a compulsion for crosses. One in every room, one everywhere you go, even if you had to improvise it out of crossed cutlery, or the sleeves of a shirt, or legs of a toy octopus. That Tuesday she made one out of ice lolly sticks and wool and hung it in the kitchen. She couldn’t listen to Jerusalem without joining in, but would always fade out with a lump in her throat by the second verse. A little brass Christ pegged up like bloody washing hung in my room, leering down at me as if asking: “What the fuck did you do this for?” I shut him in my bedside table drawer and used my prayers to beg that he wouldn’t free himself during the night and creep across my mattress to stick pins in me while I slept.

When Dad came home to find his house considerably more religious, he rolled his eyes at me and muttered, “Oh bloody… Christ.”

Nana Alice made dinner and Dad told me to go and look in the garden - a surprise, he said. The darkness of early evening autumn felt like an endless Halloween and I couldn’t bring myself to go out there, couldn’t guess what I was being initiated into now that I was the property of my father. I stood at the back door, building up the courage to open it when he appeared behind me with a torch, picked me up in his bony arms and carried me outside. Nana Alice’s round face floated like a moon at the kitchen window, sweating over a pot of slowly thickening white sauce. She didn’t look up. Perhaps my bedroom was being moved to the shed. The torchlight fell upon what looked like an enormous spider web, then another. “Ta da,” Dad said quietly. “What do you think?”

He put me down next to a small green bike and let the torch beam run slowly over it like a game show prize. I stroked the seat and wobbled it from side to side on its stand and fingered the brakes and stared, afraid to tell him I didn’t know how to ride a bike.

“Shirley down the road gave it to us. Her boys have grown out of it now, so it’s yours,” he said. Nana Alice tapped on the window and hooked her thumb backwards to get us to come in.

“Well, well, well!” she laughed. “A
big boy
bike, all for you! Wouldn’t your mama be impressed?”

Dad looked at her as if he was going to say something, then cast his eyes down at his dinner.

“Well? Do you like it?” he asked me.

I nodded, but it took the rest of the evening for the warmth to return to my hands and my chest.

#

Angela calls me twice a week now. At first I thought she was just worried about me but really she’s hoping for a breakthrough - either that Dad will have suddenly opened up to me, or that Clare will set teenage angst aside and speak to her again. Neither is going to happen. First she uses her nurse tone on me; sympathetic pragmatism to incite me into a self-obsessed rant where I’ll admit how shit I’m feeling. “I’m fine,” I tell her.

Then comes maternal guilt – she needs someone to help her sort through Dad’s stuff at the storage place – she can’t do everything for everyone, couldn’t I just help her out? I wouldn’t even need to see Dad to do it.

I don’t bite.

Finally she resorts to shouting and swearing, two things which are usually beneath her - “bullshit excuses” and “selfish bastard” and “total fucker”. I accept them all, happy to stay in distanced denial. Angie’s voice is different when she asks about Clare; it shrinks away, her okays getting smaller every time Clare refuses to take the phone. But even pity doesn’t sway me these days.

Then she hits below the belt:

“Well, don’t do it then. I’ll call Jamie, see if he’ll help me.”

“Jamie?” My voice hikes up an octave and Clare’s eyes snap to the side to stare at me.

“I can’t lift all those boxes, so if you’re not going to help me, what other choice do I have?” The “my other brother is dead” subtext is left unsaid, but very much there. Still, Jamie?

I try a laugh. “I don’t want him sniffing around Dad’s stuff, he’ll probably sell half of it,” I say.

“Who cares if he does? Look, your Dad’s paying something stupid for that storage rental each month and it’s not like he needs most of it. He said to get rid of it all. He just wants some books and personal stuff.”

A sudden flood of saliva causes me to swallow repeatedly before I can ask: “What
personal stuff?
” Personal stuff like letters from his missing wife? Personal stuff like all the things he’d never tell me in person? Proof that he knows what happened to my mum? Maybe Angie knows. Maybe she’s too respectful to look through his stuff herself, but maybe she knows what’s in that storage compartment, maybe that’s why she’s doing such an obvious job of blackmailing me into going. My lack of sleep feeds the paranoia into a hungry beast. “What stuff?”

Angela’s sigh rushes down the phone and into my ear. “I don’t know, stuff that belonged to his parents I think. Photos. I don’t have the time to go down there. If you don’t want to do it, just say. I’ll pay Jamie to go… ”

“You are not paying that fucker anything. I’ll do it.”

I can hear the self-satisfied manipulative smile in her voice. “Thank you. I’ll text you the list of stuff in a minute. Just drop it off when you visit him next week, okay? We can rent a van and clear the whole thing out another time.”

The vision of an empty storage compartment makes me nauseous. “He’s not dead yet, Angie.”

She tuts. “He asked me to do this for him, Matt. I’m just trying to do what he wants.”

I mutter an “okay” and Clare pokes me viciously in the left kidney when I put the phone down.

“What have you got against Jamie?” she says.

“He’s a dick.”

She shrugs, “He’s always nice to me. He and Alex bought me my first beer.”

“I bet they did.”

She narrows her eyes and pokes me harder, bulbous knuckles on skinny fingers like Alex’s. “He’s a nice guy, I spoke to him at the funeral. He’s really fucked up about Alex you know.”

“That’s because he was Alex’s little lapdog. Now he doesn’t have anyone to tell him what to do.”

“Wow. Bitter much?”

“Yep.”

She makes no attempt at hiding the rolling of her eyes. “Anyway… Can I come?”

“Where?”

“To see Grandad’s stuff.”

“It’s a mess in there. Just boxes and furniture piled up.”

“Yeah but… ” And just like that she transforms herself into a six-year-old with an embarrassed squint, “I bet it smells like his flat. I miss his place.”

“Do you remember the house before that? You’d just started school when he moved.”

She nods. “The carpet in mum’s bedroom looked like it was on fire.”

The thought makes me grimace. Hellish sixties swirling orange carpet. Artex on the ceiling that Angie tried to paint with clouds and blue sky. It turned out like a choppy sea. Even after she found her own place the room still felt like it was hers. At Christmas, Dad would squeeze a camp bed in there for Clare, and I would end up on the sofa. Alex took over our little room when I moved out, the twin beds replaced with a double and a desk, so tight up against one another that you could barely open the door. No sign that I had ever lived there but Dad still kept Lydia’s glasses on her bedside table. The tortoiseshell case had turned a soft grey with dust.

The year before Dad moved into the flat, Alex and I stayed up to watch
Die Hard 2
on Christmas Eve and he got drunk and told me how he still bought his mum a Christmas present. How he’d hide them in his room until Boxing Day, as if hoping Father Christmas might magic them away to her in the night. I asked him what he did with them afterwards. “Walk into town until I find a skip,” he said. Pictures of both our mothers stared down at us from the mantelpiece. A tanned and laughing Lydia, leaning towards the camera with a glass of wine in her hand. And Heather, wishing she could be sucked into the sofa and never be seen again.

“So, can I come?” Clare asks me. “I’ll help you.”

She doesn’t poke me this time, just nudges her shoulder against my ribs. I nod. And I’m sort of glad. I don’t want to go in there alone. It might swallow me up.

#

The self-storage place is the kind of yellow that makes you want to pull your eyes out of your skull. Clare and I collect Dad’s key code from the front desk and follow brightly-striped industrial floors to his compartment, just like the hospital: green for radiology, blue for paediatrics, grey for whatever floor it was they laid out Alex’s dead body.

I haven’t been here for a year, not since we dumped Dad’s stuff off and dumped him at The Farm House. There are no windows, just echoes; forgotten things and dying people’s things and divorced things and unwanted memories that threaten to kill you with guilt if you actually chuck them away. It’s the perfect setting for a serial killer movie but I am armed only with a mobile phone and insomniac rage. Fifty metres down from Dad’s compartment a guy packs boxes, listening to a comedy podcast on his phone. His laugh resounds around the steel walls.

Clare types in the code and mutters “bam bam baaam” dramatically as the door clicks open. She’s right. It smells like him, and rubber floors, and slightly damp cardboard. Automatic lights flutter into life and illuminate Dad’s sad stack of possessions. I don’t know what Clare was expecting but she looks disappointed.

“I told you, just boxes,” I say.

She flips open the nearest one. We’re meant to be looking for photo albums, sci-fi novels and a load of sentimental shit Angela tacked onto the list that Dad won’t care about. Clare pulls out a crucifix and grimaces - one of Alice’s more grotesquely realistic ones. I wonder what the hell it’s doing in Dad’s stuff.