White Lies (27 page)

“I hated him and he died.” So many times I’d told him the same thing: I hate you and I want you to die. Fuck off and die. Just go and die in a hole. Because he was annoying and a bully and my dad loved him more than me. What kind of person thinks that about their own brother?

The sergeant blinks a few times, stifles a yawn. “He tried to hit you. He was drunk. You moved out of the way. He fell.” She glances down to her notes, not that she needs to, “Is that all correct?”

I nod. Shake my head. It’s not that simple. “It’s not that simple,” I say.

“You pushed him then?”

“No.”

“You deliberately lured him to a position where he’d hit his head?”

“No, but - ”

“You bashed your voodoo doll against the wall the night before?”

I start to answer ‘no’ before I realise it wasn’t a valid question. Her eyes widen with the realisation that she said that out loud.

“Sorry. I’m sorry, it’s been a really long day, Mr Landrow.” She gestures at my scabby face. “Looks like you’ve had a rough time of it too. I think you should go home and think about this overnight.”

She finishes up the paperwork and asks me to fill in my details. I read back the address I’ve written twice before I realise why it’s wrong - it’s the house I grew up in, conjured up by my confession. I don’t amend it.

She stands. I don’t. She sighs. “Look. Your statement’s down. I can see if I can get a copy of the coroner’s report for your half-brother if you think it might help. But I would really recommend that you get some rest, go see your GP, and find some help.” She tries a smile. “We’ll call you if we find anything we can charge you with. Please stop beating yourself up and take your girlfriend home.”

She got the half-brother bit right. Probably the first person in months to do so. I almost go to correct her. I have to say something to fill the gap: “She’s not my girlfriend.”

I can see the silhouette of Sarah’s messy ponytail through the safety glass set into the door. She’s been sitting in the waiting room this whole time. I don’t want to go home with her. I don’t want to go home.

“I used to tease him that he had long eyelashes,” I blurt out.

“What?”

“Alex. Cow eyelashes. Girl’s eyelashes. I convinced him to cut them. He cut his eyelashes off because of me. It was meant to be just a trim but he went too far. Do you know how long it takes to grow eyelashes? How weird you look without them?”

“No,” she replies.

“A long time. And weird.”

The sergeant holds her arm out towards the door, “Well. Shall we?”

I can’t move. She’s going to have to physically pick me up if she wants me to leave. “I didn’t pass on the message that Angie had got into university because I didn’t want her to leave me alone with
them
.”

“Right.”

They called her back. It was fine. But I left her stressing about whether she’d got in or not for a whole week. “She was the peacemaker. Lydia was dead and it would have been just us three left. Alex, Dad and me.”

“I see.”

“I persuaded Jenna Rowbray to drink half a bottle of vodka so I could get her drunk enough to… I don’t know… do something, anything with me. But she snogged Kieran Hadley instead. Then when she puked all over herself I called her mum to pick her up and told her Jenna had bought us the vodka.

“I stole a Mars bar from the corner shop every Friday after school for a whole year. I accidentally snapped Angie’s dreamcatcher thing she’d made on a school trip and blamed Alex. I smoked all of Lydia’s secret stash of fags and she never asked who did it. I never told Nana Alice that I loved her.”

I never told Nana Alice that I loved her. Not once. I’d roll my eyes when she hugged me, squirm out of the way, grunt responses like a stupid little teenager, when she was the only one to really, genuinely mother me.

My voice grows higher and higher and is laden with squeaks - the boulder in my throat making it difficult for sound to squeeze past it. Maybe it’s throat cancer. I swallow and it hurts. The policewoman nods absently and stares at the floor.

“I only visit my dad because I have to. I hate it. I hate that place. I feel like I’m going to have a panic attack when I pull into the drive. I don’t want to talk to him, I don’t care if he’s there or not. When he dies it will be a weight off my shoulders and that’s a fucking awful thing to say, isn’t it? I’m just waiting for him to die because it’s really inconvenient and annoying for me to have to visit him every single fucking week, visit a Dad that doesn’t give a shit about me, has never been proud - never once looked at me and been proud of me. I’m a horrible person.”

I’m trying to think of more confessions and trying not to cry at the same time. “I told Alex he had cow eyes.”

She sits on the edge of the desk, her whole body sinking into a silent sigh. “I can see that you’re feeling a lot of guilt,” she says, very quietly. “But you don’t seem like a bad person to me. I think you should talk to someone professional, or someone close to you, about all of this.”

I glance out the door again. “Can’t you put me in a cell, just for tonight?”

Another grimace of pity. “No.”

I remember what’s in my pocket and lay Dad’s confiscated bag of weed on the table between us.

“Please?” I bargain.

“Really?” The sergeant almost laughs but stops herself. She slides the drugs over to her side and shakes her head. “You’re not getting in a cell for that.”

“It’s not mine, anyway,” I tell her, and an uninvited grin stamps itself onto my mouth. “It’s my fucking dad’s.”

She licks her lips, chews the bottom one, lets it slide free of her teeth and ping out again. “Is there no-one you can talk to about all of this?”

I sniff, excuse myself, say “Sabine?” Like she would know who that is, like she could magically make her appear, make Sarah disappear, make everything go away.

The sergeant says she’ll tell Sarah to go if I promise not to drive home. She leaves me in a little back office with some tissues and a polystyrene cup of thin tea and I cry for a bit, while she goes and dumps my non-girlfriend-supervisor for me.

When the policewoman returns she makes me promise again – no driving – and I say of course not. I don’t say what I really think which is that if I got on a bus right now I think I’ll start punching people. She shakes my hand and looks sorry. I limp out of the station and along the dark path through the park to my car.

“What was that all about?”

Sarah sits on the back bumper with a six pack of beer in her lap. The sun is gone, faded behind cardboard cut-outs of suburbia. It’s been raining but I can’t feel the cold and I couldn’t care less. I feel drunk, though I’m not, so I reckon I should probably tie up the sensation with some hard proof and take the drink Sarah offers me.

She points with her own beer back towards the police station. “Did they charge you with anything?”

“No. Told me to get my head checked.”

“Good plan.”

“Should probably do that, yeah.”

I drink. She drinks. And I say a silent toast for my confessions.

Sarah says, “Are you going to go completely mental or is this just a little breakdown?”

“I don’t know.”

The beer is grainy and pissy but it quells the feeling of looseness that has been making me trip over my feet. The warmth nestles into my chest and gets sucked through the appropriate channels under my skin, to spread to my groin and my throat and my hands. It starts to rain again but I’m sweating and it’s a relief.

“Do you want me to drop you home?” I ask her. It’s probably too late for an apology.

“No,” she says, dumping the rest of the beers into my arms and turning back towards the park. “Just… Sort yourself out before you come back to work. If you’re coming back. And if you ever feel better, you can ask me out properly.”

#

I park outside my house, the one on the police form, the one we grew up in, Alex and Angela and me. And Dad, alone with three kids, in way over his head.

The house looks too small to have contained us all: a martyr, a runaway, a tyrant, a demon and the rest. They’ve double glazed the windows and put on a porch. They’ve got venetian blinds and a Honda Civic.

My glovebox rings. I leave it shut, standing like a stalker on the grass verge, watching for lights to go on, for someone to come out and shout at me.

“Matthew?”

A thin, doddery man pauses halfway up the path next door dragging a wheelie bin behind him, gripping onto the handle as if it’s the only think keeping him upright. “Matthew? Matt?”

Shit, is he still living there? “Graham?”

He beckons me over, laughing breathlessly at something that really isn’t funny.

“I thought it was you,” he says, patting me awkwardly on the arms, then the shoulders, almost instigating a hug but restraining himself to a palm on my cheek - apparently still unconvinced that I’m real. I am on my second beer and my concussion is loving it. When he stops touching me I am left swaying.

“Matt. It’s been… It’s good to see you. What happened to your head? Do you want to come in for a bit?”

I shrug. I think I might start crying again. The rain is getting heavier and the cold has started to seep through my numbness. “I brought some beer,” I say, and follow him up the path.

Chapter Twenty-Four

There must have been some sort of photographic explosion. Pictures carpet the floor of my room - a spectrum of sepia and greyscale, the orange tinge of the seventies and the unreal brightness of digital image. My parents and my parents’ parents sit stiffly with uneasy smiles - babies trussed up in ruffled collars and hard leather shoes, young women in shift dresses and gloves. Men in uniform, men in lines like sports teams; front row down on one knee, the next with fists in laps, the last standing awkwardly behind. I find one of my father and his peers. My aunt has neatly marked a date of death for each face on the reverse.

There are pictures of Lydia’s ancestors too, people I never knew, and I will never now know their names or deeds and misdeeds. Uncontrollably curly hair stands out from heads down the generations: cherubs in infancy, a Pears’ soap advert in youth, tempered styling in adulthood.

Most of Heather’s photos are gone. I couldn’t look at them. I found a way to ignore the one that sat, unageing, on the mantelpiece, even when I was facing it, even when I dusted the very wood beneath it. It was easier to be widowed. There’s peace in a lover being dead and cold, to watch their coffin slide into the furnace, to know you will never touch them again, to have to be satisfied with the memories you still hold onto and the warming remnants of the ones you don’t. Losing Heather left behind the gut-yanking nausea of realising the hob has been left burning, of getting onto a plane without your luggage, of losing grip on a child’s hand in a crowd.

I drag the rest of the albums down from the top of the wardrobe and start to pull pictures out of their little crackled sheaths. The floor is covered in faces. I sit amongst them and they watch soundlessly as I fall apart. The children are here in various stages of youth and happiness. Little protruding bellies and chubby wrists, lengthening limbs, braces on teeth, growing out fringes and the odd scraped knee. Posing with bikes, outside tents, next to snowmen, up trees, in sacks in races, trying to avoid the camera’s eye with adolescent rage. And little Clare, surrounded by toys – my favourite picture of them all – a Christmas day. Angela tired and serene, Clare barely six months, sitting wobbly in a circle of cushions, Alex offering her a stuffed panda, Matthew watching behind with proud affection in his eyes.

Blood spatters across Matthew’s face. I blink. Another drip explodes in a blossom of crimson on the glossy surface of the picture. Blink. Think. I check beneath my nose but I can’t feel my fingers. My hand is missing. Blood dribbles down my forearm. It doesn’t hurt but it won’t stop bleeding and I should be worried, shouldn’t I?

I peel a photo of Lydia’s father off the carpet and crumple it around my wrist as a rudimentary bandage. I drop to my knees and crawl through the faces and holidays and family gatherings to find my missing hand. It’s got to be here somewhere. It can’t have got far.

#

Ding dong merrily on high, in heaven my wife is cursing.

Ding dong goes the porter’s page, they’re coming to stop me singing.

Glooooooooooooooooooooooooooooria!

My mystic in exchange, please?

Glooooooooooooooooooooooooooooria…

“Peter. Stop, please.”

“What’s wrong with Christmas carols?”

“Just stop, Peter.”

“Bugger it.”

“Peter.”

“WHAT?” I roar.

I couldn’t escape through the doorway if I tried. It glows angrily but two nurses and a porter wearing a Father Christmas hat block my way out of the bedroom. I am floating on an ocean of false smiles and I have lost something important.

“Where the hell is Gloria when you need her?”

“Gloria? You mean Angela?”

“No, I mean Gloria.”

“Who’s Gloria?”

“Never mind, she’s probably dead now.”

“Angela’s in a meeting - ”