White Lies

Legend Press Ltd, The Old Fire Station,
140 Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4SD
[email protected]
|
www.legendpress.co.uk

Contents © Jo Gatford 2014

The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

Print ISBN 978-1-9101620-4-0

Ebook ISBN 978-1-9101620-5-7

Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International.

Cover design by Simon Levy
www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Jo Gatford
is a writer from Brighton. She was the winner of the 2013 Luke Bitmead Bursary and longlisted for the 2013 Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize.

She has, at one time or another, been: a till-monkey in a book shop, a circus performer, a childminder, a cleaner of expensive Hovian houses, a baby massage teacher, a graveyard-shift hotel waitress, an antenatal yoga teacher, and musician. Her flash fiction and short stories have been published in various UK and US literary magazines, including
Litro
,
PANK
, and
SmokeLong Quarterly
.

Visit Jo at
jogatford.com
or on
Twitter
@jmgatford

For my boys.

Chapter One

There’s a head-shaped hole in the plasterboard of my living room wall. A cracked depression, clumsily slathered with Polyfilla. I’ve learned how to ignore it, to unfocus my vision when I pass. I’ve acclimatised to the discomfort of it, like a lump I can’t swallow. I thought it might be easier once I’d cleaned the blood away. There was only a smear from where he’d lurched up, after the impact. A smear and the echo of a little internal voice that said, “I’m never getting my deposit back now,” instead of, “Is he okay?”

Because, at the time, I couldn’t give a shit. That’s the sum of it. And they all know it. My fault. Blame me. Even though the autopsy report said it was inevitable, even though the police poked unenthusiastically at the crumbling dent in the wall and offered shrugged condolences instead of handcuffs. I know. I killed my brother.

“Half-brother,” I corrected the policeman as he wrote in his little notebook. Let’s get that right at least.

I don’t believe in ghosts but he’s haunting me all the same, like an absence of noise you hadn’t noticed was there - the unsettling feeling of pausing a song on the inhale. I sleep on the sofa, the muted TV for a campfire - to keep the wild things at bay. Except it doesn’t. The moment I slip away, the nightmares creep through the cracks in the plaster and my half-brother’s stupid head leers out at me. A reminder of my purgatory, every Sunday, bowing at the altar of my father’s armchair, mumbling the same answers to the same questions:

“When’s Alex coming?”

“Where’s Alex?”

“Why doesn’t he visit me?”

“Why doesn’t he come?”

And I have to take in a slow, dry breath, as though the air is full of sand, and it starts all over again: “Dad… Alex died.”

Today the news slips out with no preamble, no parachute to lessen the gut-wrenching drop. It’s been three weeks. Sometimes it’s better just to say it straight away. Sometimes, these days, he doesn’t even reply. Dad’s responses have cycled through distress, hatred, obliviousness, ambivalence and, most recently, a sneering disdain - like he doesn’t even believe me. Practice doesn’t make it any easier. In fact, I’m more bored than sick of the whole fucking thing. Maybe tragedy becomes dull when it’s inevitable.

My father sits there in his floral armchair, three feet away from me, pretending I don’t exist. He stares at the door, occasionally dropping his chin to his chest, clearing his throat of fifty years’ worth of tobacco-tinged phlegm, glancing nervously at the drawers beneath his bed.

“Dad? Did you hear me?”

He looks up, nods absently, and pats down the left arm of his chair in a vague attempt to find the remote control. It’s on his lap, next to the stump of his right arm, where his hand used to be. I don’t point it out to him, don’t want to show him how slow and stupid he has become.

His world has been reduced to a single room in the third-nicest dementia nursing home in the South East and his mind is downsizing along with it – making heavy-handed attempts at erasing itself, like trying to cover footprints with dynamite. I’m the last one he reliably recognises, and I’m probably the last person he wants to see.

I cast around for something to say, some reminder that might yank him back from fairyland for a minute or two. He sits like he’s in a waiting room, imposing on someone else’s home, sitting in someone else’s seat. He’ll spend the day that way, anxiously anticipating something he can’t remember, too proud or polite to ask where he is, or when he’s going home.

I can’t sit here anymore. The bed twangs and undulates as I stand. We watch it come to a lazy stop. A slice of afternoon sunlight, full of dead skin, highlights a single square on the silky quilted eiderdown. The type of bedding Nana Alice thought was classy and luxurious but would fuse to skin like molten plastic if ever it saw a naked flame. It’s not the same as hers; the wrong shade of dirty pink, the wrong pattern of roses. Not familiar enough, though it has that same musty scent of sandalwood and sweat. I used to lie belly-down on her bed and press the cool satin against my temple, a crackle of static in my ear. But these are my memories, not Dad’s. I carry around the same questions for him as I did when I was small, when Nana Alice’s house was home and he was just a visitor. Thirty-something years and I still can’t bring myself to ask him plainly. And now it’s too late. He’s too weak to interrogate. Instead, I worry about health and safety and wonder if I should tell the staff about the fire hazard combination of my chain-smoking dad and his highly flammable eiderdown.

His few remaining possessions are laid out on top of the chest of drawers like a shrine: a stack of books, photos in heavy silver frames, a radio, his prosthetic hand. It looks obscenely false sitting there, like a prop in a comedy sketch. I pick up each photo, hardly seeing them, replacing them as softly as I can. Even movement is slow in this thick air. Angela with a red-eyed baby Clare, Alex and me in an apple tree, my stepmum Lydia’s teasing smile. None of me before Alex was born. None of my mother. I took the last remaining one of her with me when we cleared out his flat. The one that used to sit on his mantelpiece. He never asked for it back. A charity Christmas card sits next to the radio - a robin in snow, a generic Merry Christmas from all the staff at The Farm House and an extra kiss from Angela, his step-daughter, my step-sister, destined to watch him fall to pieces in her workplace. Poor fuckers, the lot of them.

He watches me out of his peripheral vision while I pick through his belongings, reluctantly searching for a conversation starter. Something not to do with Alex.

He used to ask where he was, why he was here, what we had done with his glasses. Before that, the questions were more innocuous but it was his questions that brought him here.

“Where do I keep the beans?” he’d asked, when I brought his shopping up to the flat. And according to Angela and the doctor and the nursing home, knowing which cupboard you store your baked beans in – unchanged for fifteen years – is the hinge upon which independent living hangs.

He didn’t ask any more questions when I explained how Angela could get him a place at The Farm House at a subsidised rate, and that by selling his flat he could afford to pay the rent at the nursing home until… And then I didn’t know how to phrase “until you die”.

I took his silence for reluctant agreement.

No, I didn’t.

I took his silence for miserable defeat, but I pretended it was reluctant agreement while we packed up his things and sold off his furniture, putting the rest of his stuff in storage until… “In case you want them sometime, Dad.”

I swallow, reaching limply for small talk, turning the cheap Christmas card in my hands. “Angie said she wanted to take you to The Boatman for Christmas lunch, maybe.”

No response. I force words out of myself like splinters, trying to trigger a memory. “Remember when Nana Alice picked a fight with the chef there? About the scampi?” I say. Nana Alice is a safe choice. The memory of his mother-in-law might revive him if only to bitch about her. “She said it tasted like gristle wrapped in bits of cardboard.”