reading

1

Present day

We were almost asleep. We were like one being then; our bodies as close as could be. But the flash lit up the room so brightly, grey turning to a blueish white, that I could see it even with my eyes closed.

I sat up, the duvet falling away from my skin and leaving goosebumps in its wake. Jack’s house was always so cold. I tried to locate the source of the light. It was coming from the iPad resting on the bedside table.

I don’t know why I looked. Perhaps I was actually already asleep, because I was unfurling from the covers, stretching out to pick it up, my naked torso ghoulishly reflected in the large windows, before I even really considered what I was doing.

ITEM 1

From: Charlie Masters

To: Jack Ross

Subject: Fwd: Douglas’s Atrocity Rears Its Head Again

Hi, sorry to dredge up your history, but I thought you should see this … that you’d want to know.

Charlie Masters. Charlie – I didn’t know him. I’d met only Jack’s family; not a single one of his friends.

I paused, my finger poised over the email. One swipe and I could see it. I must have waited a second too long, because the iPad dimmed, and I replaced it on the table, the email and my mad moment almost forgotten.

The Newcastle night outside was completely black. I knew the countryside was just beyond it, but I couldn’t see it.

‘Rachel. What you doing?’ Jack yawned. I loved that Scottish what; the soft rush of the pronounced ‘h’. Whotyadee’n? It was so deep, his voice. Strangers commented on it.

He rolled over and switched the lamp on. His dark hair was all over the place, and as he sat upright and revealed his beard, and then his chest hair, I thought he looked a bit like a caveman.

‘Something lit up,’ I said.

‘Probably the cat doing stuff,’ he mumbled.

‘Maybe. He was in here,’ I lied. I looked at the room. He hadn’t decorated – not really; not in the way I wanted him to – but there was one thing on the wall. The only thing, against the exposed brickwork and the lack of curtains and lack of anything, was a grainy pregnancy scan, curling slightly at the edges.

He saw me looking. ‘What’s Wally up to?’ he said.

We called the baby Wally, because neither of us could see it on the scan. It had stuck.

‘Sleeping,’ I said with a smile.

I drew the covers self-consciously up to my neck, imagining the lamplight showing the fat blue veins that had appeared almost overnight on my breasts, running across my skin like plant roots; covering up my pink and wilted nipples.

Jack smiled back at me, then stood up and left the room. I watched his long body retreat down the hallway, his olive-toned skin catching the moonlight that filtered in through his windows. He walked duck-footed, which made my heart sing. My groin churned as his bum flexed, ready again even though we’d had sex just hours previously: the insatiable appetite of new lovers. He returned a few seconds later with a hot-water bottle in one hand and with Howard, his ginger cat, in the other.

He’d started doing that recently. Making hot-water bottles. He’d seen me do it the other week and had wordlessly taken it on as his task. Every night, no matter whether we slept at my place or his, he brought a hot-water bottle up to me, handed it over with a smile.

‘Told you he was around,’ I said, gesturing to the cat.

Howard turned and looked at me, his head upside down, his eyes surprised.

‘He’s a pain,’ Jack said, as Howard squirmed and jumped on to the bed.

Jack was working temporarily in Newcastle for City Lights magazine. He’d moved down from Scotland, for a while. The first time I went to his house, I had asked him why he had bought a cat. ‘A man living alone with just a cat for company?’ I had teased.

‘Every house needs a cat,’ he said. ‘Every single one. Anyone who disagrees is wrong.’

Jack sat down next to Howard now, and looked at me, a half-smile curving his lips.

I wondered when I’d stop feeling giddy when he looked at me like that. I was punch-drunk, could often be found smiling happily, deliriously, at myself in his bathroom mirror while I scrubbed my make-up off with his Nivea soap.

‘When will you get curtains?’ I said, instead of saying all that; feeling stupid with only my head poking out of the duvet.

Jack considered my request seriously, though he no doubt didn’t care about curtains himself. ‘When we move. The neighbours have seen it all, anyway,’ he said with a raised eyebrow. It was one of our inside jokes, that. How much sex we had. How good at it we were. So good we made a baby. ‘What would you like?’

‘Nice ones. Thick ones,’ I said. ‘The light wakes me up.’

‘Consider it done.’ He pointed behind me. ‘Pass me that?’

I blinked, then looked and pretended to notice his iPad for the first time; that I hadn’t just been holding it, my finger paused to open his email with a swipe. It felt hot in my hands as I passed it to him. He held it for a few moments, the screen blank.

‘Rugby season started Saturday,’ he said.

I turned over and lay on my side, propped up on one elbow. Howard settled between my feet, not pleasingly warm and silky, like most cats, but fat and weighty, like a doorstop. ‘I’ve never known a rugby player,’ I said with a grin.

‘Not at school?’

I gave a derisive snort. ‘Seriously?’

‘Oh, I forgot you went to school in the Bronx,’ Jack said with a laugh, his hand disappearing underneath the duvet and resting on my hip. My whole left side immediately stood to attention, prickling; a Catherine wheel of fire spinning in my belly. I tried to concentrate, but it was almost impossible.

‘Just Newcastle’s finest,’ I said. ‘Not all of us can go to schools that have their own hymns and live-in staff. Tell me again what you used to have for lunch?’

This was one of our favourite games, and I made Jack tell my friends and family about it all the time. He always managed to come up with another pretentious dish. He hung his head in mock shame. ‘Tiger prawns with pak choi?’ he said with a meek laugh. It was deep and low; more of an amused exhale. Like music.

He covered his face with his hands. ‘For the record, I am sorry.’

‘Pak choi,’ I said with a hoot of laughter. ‘Pak choi.’

‘One simply cannot play lacrosse without being fuelled by a hearty lunch of pak choi,’ he said.

‘Our teachers had bullet-proof vests,’ I said.

‘They did not.’

‘Only for a term, after Jonny Steele brought a rifle in.’

‘Wow,’ he mouthed. He moved his hand to my thigh, fingers dancing lightly, as if he was playing the piano. His hand felt relaxed against my body, but the expression on his face was troubled, momentarily. ‘Anyway, you should come. One Saturday. Not to the match. That’s boring. But after. There’s drinks.’

‘Okay,’ I said, a fresh zing of happiness working its way up my spine. From our brilliant beginning, spent gazing at each other in cafes, kissing outside restaurants, ignoring waiters because our heads were full of each other, to our shaky period, that shocking afternoon in front of the positive pregnancy test when we both barely knew what to say to each other, and now here we were on the cusp of autumn and I was going to his rugby club, like a proper girlfriend.

‘You mean I’ll actually be meeting people you know?’ I said.

I was teasing, but Jack’s hand stopped moving across my skin, and he withdrew it.

‘If you want,’ he said. He was still looking at me. His eyes were crinkled at the corners.

It had been nearly seven months, and I still hadn’t met his friends. I was three months pregnant, and Wally had grown from two cells, to four, to eight, to a tangerine-sized foetus. Now here we finally were. Better late than never.

‘There’s a clubhouse where everyone drinks, after. It is a bit raucous, though.’

‘Too much pak choi?’ I said.

Jack laughed softly. ‘Mostly just misogyny. Ignore them.’

‘Oh good.’

He smiled at me. It was only quick, brief, but genuine. I smiled back and we held each other’s gaze for a moment too long.

He looked away first, and I watched the tip of his index finger blanch white as he pressed the ‘home’ button on his iPad. Something closed down in his expression. No, not closed down, exactly. Opened, then closed, like somebody intruding on two strangers in a back bedroom at a party, then closing the door again. His stubble-covered cheeks hollowed, then filled, as he swiped across the screen. And then he dismissed the notification. It was gone, deliberately unread, and he was opening his Kindle app and reading Austen again – he only ever seemed to read books by women, a fact which made me love him even more – his skin swarthy and tanned against the white pillows, his expression entirely neutral. I looked at his full, dark red lips for a second before turning over myself.

I stared, eye level with the curtainless window, wondering about the look that had crossed Jack’s face. I could still see it in my mind; something came before that forced neutral expression. Didn’t it?

‘You get an email?’ I said. ‘I thought it lit up.’ I was still facing the window.

‘No, no,’ Jack said.

And that was what did it, I suppose. That was the moment that everything sprang from.

I said nothing in reply. What could I say? I was mistaken. It was spam. He’d forgotten, already. Or it was a work email. Just work. And he didn’t want to discuss work.

‘Look at that,’ Jack said to me a few seconds later.

I turned back to face him. One of his pectoral muscles was twitching.

‘Palpitations,’ he said, his eyes sliding left and locking on to mine. His breath smelt of toothpaste and the coffee he’d finished ten minutes before bed. It was his evening routine. Coffee and chocolate, then bed; his way of eking out the last and best part of the night.

‘No – muscle fasciculation,’ I said sleepily. ‘Twitches. Too much caffeine. Or maybe you’re run-down.’ I laughed gently at this; another of our in-jokes.

He’d been a political correspondent and court reporter, in Scotland, and then branched out into travel writing, which he much preferred. He would admit he could never be run-down. He got up at ten and did things only the self-employed could do in the morning: put washing on, made proper filter coffee, opened post. He finished work at four in the afternoon and watched Pointless with tea and biscuits.

Where Ben, my ex-boyfriend and a teacher, would cagily refer to marking and long hours and parents’ evenings, Jack embraced his status as a slacker. ‘Yeah, I can take Wednesday afternoons off, if I like,’ he would say over dinner. ‘Best job in the world.’

He wasn’t a slacker, though, not really. He’d spend weeks working until midnight, his beard gradually growing longer and longer and his sleep patterns more nocturnal. And then he’d produce a handful of beautiful articles, lovely prose, and revert back to his old routine.

‘Take a muscle relaxant, if you like,’ I said. ‘Buscopan.’

‘Will that work?’ he asked, sounding delighted.

It was a classic anxious-type response. Textbook. He wanted a fix, a solution, and some reassurance from a doctor. But he was my classic anxious type.

‘Well, muscle twitches aren’t serious,’ I said. ‘But yes.’

‘I’m not about to shuffle off this mortal coil, then?’ he said, an arm snaking its way around my shoulders before lightly ruffling my hair.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You are a massive hypochondriac, though.’

‘I know. But it’s handy knowing a doc.’

‘Hmm,’ I said quietly, and he sighed.

We resumed our positions spooning in the bed, Howard settled between us like a small barge. Jack fell asleep immediately, but I didn’t; I never do.

It happened again, like it always did, when I eventually slept. I dreamt of the boy in front of me, sitting on the floor, a nasal cannula tracking underneath his nose like a transparent worm. He reached towards me, but I waved my hands through his. He disappeared, as he always did, when I woke.

3

I awoke to a gentle shaking of my shoulder. It was a Saturday morning, the room a greyish blue. ‘Rach, Rach,’ Jack was saying.

That deep voice, his hands on my skin, reminded me of the early days. Before the pregnancy. How he called me five minutes after our first date officially ended, said he wanted to cook a meal for me. When was I free? The next day, I replied. We played no games. I went over straight from the office, in my work clothes, my make-up fading; he was cooking chicken fajitas, barefoot in his kitchen. He introduced me to his cat. ‘I think you’ll get on,’ he said. After that, he kissed me, straight away, a full, deep kiss, standing in his hallway. Then he said, ‘I want to carry on, but Howard will eat the chicken.’

I opened my eyes in his bedroom. ‘What?’ I said, the memories of months ago fading.

‘We have to go.’

‘Where?’

‘That breakfast meeting. The interview. With the music guy – about his festival.’

It wasn’t Jack’s words that forced me to open my eyes, but his tone. It was urgent. Perhaps the most urgent I’d ever heard him. I checked the digital clock, glowing green across the dimly lit room. ‘At seven in the morning?’

‘His idea …’ He paused, his gaze still on me. ‘I love you,’ he said.

He told me often; he wasn’t shy about it. It was refreshing, how demonstrative he was.

I sat up against the pillows, conscious of my snarled hair, and looked at him. I was unable to wake up, really, in those early-pregnancy days. Everything was hazy until about noon. I opened my mouth to ask if I could stay, then closed it again. Were we there yet? I didn’t know. It wasn’t my house. His parents had bought it for him, his temporary Newcastle house. We didn’t yet live together. Maybe it was strange to suggest such a thing – lazy and entitled.

Then I shook my head. We were having a baby. We’d live together soon, anyway. We had to be there, whether we liked it or not. ‘You go,’ I said. ‘I’ll look after Howard and make you a bacon sandwich.’ I smiled up at him.

He paused; he wasn’t smiling back. He said nothing.

My eyes gradually adjusted to the dim light, and I saw an unmistakable look of panic cross his features. I could see the whites of his eyes, all around his black irises, like a dog hearing noises at a front door in the middle of the night.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You can’t do that.’

‘It’s fine,’ I said.

‘Please get up,’ he said. His tone was bizarre; wheedling, almost.

I frowned at him.

‘I need a lift, you see,’ he said.

And it was less his words and more his body language that made me swing my legs out of bed: he was standing over me, making hurrying gestures. Huffing. Bouncing slightly on his toes, like somebody very late for something.

‘Jack, you need to drive again. You can’t pass your test and then not drive – for no reason.’ I don’t know why I said it. It wasn’t the time.

‘I know how. But it’s been too long since I’ve done it, I’d need lessons,’ he muttered. ‘Come on,’ he urged.

‘Alright.’

‘Your stuff,’ he said. He was bundling up my clothes, my dirty socks strewn across his floor, stuffing them into my hands. My arms overflowed with them. My bra dropped to the floor and he sighed.

‘Just leave them,’ I said.

‘No.’ He found my bag and started cramming it full, taking the clothes back off me. His face was impassive. But his hands were shaking. With panic, it seemed to me.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said, my eyes on those hands.

‘I’m just late. I’m always late,’ he said.

I backed off, then. It was true.

I got dressed. All the while he stood, waiting, at the door to the bedroom. It was just a rushed Saturday morning, I told myself. ‘What’s up?’ I said to him. ‘You’re being weird.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m just late,’ he insisted.

What could I say? Where I might have challenged him, I didn’t, because of Wally. To keep the peace, but also because I was responsible, I felt, for that pregnancy. I didn’t want to add to the things I’d done to make things hard for us.

He put his shoes on and washed his hands in the sink, in that way that he always did. ‘They’re dirty,’ he said to me, with a smile, as he saw me looking. ‘Shoes are dirty.’

‘I might start doing it myself,’ I said.

‘It’s actually perfectly logical. Try it.’

He stood against the counter, his back to the sink. He beckoned to me, palm up, his index finger slightly extended. I went to him. He was warm and his chest muscles were firm against my fingertips. He hugged me for a moment, burying his head playfully in my neck and breathing me in. I put my shoes on, and he turned the tap on for me.

I didn’t even notice I was doing it. I rolled my sleeves to my elbows, squirted the soap on to my hands, and did a full, scrubbing-up wash. Between my fingers. The tops of my hands. My palms. Up my forearms, to my elbows, my hands held up vertically.

‘You do it just like in Grey’s Anatomy,’ Jack said.

‘Ah,’ I said, laughing self-consciously. ‘Once you’ve been taught how to wash your hands, you never go back.’ I grabbed a tea towel and dried them, trying to ignore the look Jack was giving me.

And so, less than five minutes after being woken, I was in my cold car, make-up-less and wearing jeans that felt too stiff against my skin for a Saturday morning. They should have been pyjamas. It should have been a sofa, Jack’s bed. Not this.

‘Where am I going?’ I said.

‘I’ll tell you – keep going on this road,’ he said.

I drove for less than half a mile before he asked me to turn left and pull into a car park. It was a well-known cafe, one we’d considered going to for brunch but had never got around to. We were in the car for three minutes. It was less than a ten-minute walk.

He leant back against the passenger seat, visibly relaxed. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Are you late?’

He smiled quickly at me, as he was getting out. ‘Always,’ he said.

I looked at the clock. It was quarter past seven.

‘Thanks.’ He poked his head back through the open window of the car. ‘I’ll come over later?’ he said. He was holding his house key, close to his chest.

‘Okay,’ I said.

He paused, momentarily, his elbows resting on the window frame. His eyebrows were raised. He was biting his bottom lip. His teeth were white and straight. He looked like he wanted to kiss me, but he was late and it was awkward for him to reach into the car. Instead, he extended his hand towards me, his fingertips just brushing my shoulder.

I watched him go. At the door, he turned to me and blew me a kiss.

I flushed with pleasure, but my mind was spinning as the car idled. There was something strange about his behaviour, I thought, but then dismissed my nosiness. He was probably just late. Scatty.

Jack pushed open the door to the cafe and took a seat on his own. Nobody was waiting for him.

He let himself into my flat later that evening. The building was always busy, so he often managed to get in without buzzing me. I didn’t mind. I left my front door on the latch for him.

I looked up when he arrived. He didn’t seem sheepish, or contrite. His expression was open, his smile wide. He was holding a fruit pie from Waitrose.

‘I bring pudding,’ he declared triumphantly, balancing it on the palm of his hand like a waiter.

I didn’t say anything. I was pulling washing out of the machine but had stopped when he arrived, a wet towel wound around my hand.

He saw my expression and his smile faded.

‘Earlier,’ I began. The events had steeped all day in my mind and had become a stewed and bitter tea by then. ‘You woke me up.’ I started ticking the items off on my fingers. ‘You made me pack up my clothes. You made me drive you a totally walkable distance.’

He was waiting for me to finish, the pie still in the air.

‘And you were – well, you were mean to me. Like you were angry,’ I said, hating how small my voice sounded. ‘And then there wasn’t even anybody there. I saw the cafe. It was empty.’

‘Oh,’ he said, turning momentarily away from me and putting the pie on the counter. ‘I’m sorry.’ His gaze when he turned back was direct and unwavering.

‘And?’ I said.

‘I prefer unreserved apologies. Otherwise they’re meaningless.’

‘But why did you …?’

‘I just panicked. I’m sorry. I’m always late and I’m such a shambles. Sorry. I shouldn’t have used you for a lift. I’ll start driving again soon.’

‘It’s not about driving. It’s about being treated – like that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

I shrugged, picking up the washing again. He’d apologized. We couldn’t turn back time.

He came over to help, grabbing the pile and taking it over to the airer. ‘This’ll be Wally’s tiny clothes soon,’ he said. ‘A little row of tiny baby socks.’

Baby socks. He’d said that to me once before. On the day we took the pregnancy test. That strange, shocking, bitter-sweet afternoon.

We’d bought a digital test from the Spar. Jack said digital was best, said he could easily imagine a pink line where there was none; that we needed certainty.

I knew, but was ignoring it. The hot nausea. The late period. The strange dizzy spells. The memories of that night we didn’t use a condom. I knew, but was postponing my knowledge.

We took it back to mine and sat on the side of the bath together while it rested on the window sill, like a ticking bomb. We checked it after two minutes; both peeping over at it, as though looking slowly could change anything.

Pregnant 1-2.

That’s all it said.

He spoke first: ‘Ah.’

‘Ah, indeed,’ I said. I had darted a glance at him then. In that moment where everything changed.

Later, I might have said the reason I never considered an abortion was because of my medical training. That I knew what went on, had seen it happen. The suction device. The remains; the hospital cremates them.

But no. It wasn’t that. And it certainly wasn’t because I felt sure I would be a good mother. I didn’t. Not after Mum, and not after the boy. I still lost sleep over that. Wondering whether I could be trusted. Whether I would ever be good enough.

So, no. It wasn’t those things. It was Jack’s face. He was staring down at the test with an unmistakable expression of joy. He had his fist to his mouth, like an excited child, and when he looked at me his eyes were shining.

‘I know … it’s not ideal,’ he said. ‘I know we’re so new. But …’ He pointed down at the stick, still saying Pregnant 1-2. ‘That’s you and me.’

‘It is,’ I said, unable to stop smiling myself.

‘And we’re pretty ace,’ he continued.

‘We are.’

‘Also – baby socks. The biggest argument for babies, ever.’

‘Baby socks?’

‘Tiny baby socks,’ he said. ‘Is there anything cuter?’

The memory of that afternoon fading, I went over to him and wordlessly hung up a sheet.

‘I can leave if you’d like,’ he said. ‘If you’re pissed off? I know it was unfair – waking you up was rubbish. I am sorry.’

I thought about it for a second. But it was too hard. The lure of him, here, helping me with the washing, sharing a pie later on and laughing. His warm body next to mine that night in my bed. It was too hard to resist.

Besides, he was always good at apologies.

4

One year ago

The boy and I got on well immediately. He was sixteen when he initially came into my hospital clinic. It was my first clinic as a newly promoted registrar; the buck stopped with me, for the first time. My palms were sweating.

He liked collecting Topps football cards; he had hundreds of them. They fell out of his pockets when he shifted on the chair. They cascaded down on to the floor and he hastily picked them up, carefully putting them back in an order only he knew. He was young for sixteen, still childlike in that way. Collecting things. Obsessing.

‘That’s Ralph Callachan,’ he muttered to himself, his dark fringe falling in his eyes.

His mum looked at me. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘He lives in the bloody seventies.’ She pointed to one of the cards in the boy’s lap. It was of a blond player sporting a mullet. ‘Collects these old footballer cards.’

‘Very retro,’ I said, nodding to the cards. ‘Very hip.’

The boy smiled. He had pale skin and dark hair, dark lashes. Red cheeks. He could sell that blush, if he could bottle it.

He’d been having trouble running, he said. The school yard felt uneven; his knee ached during playtime. He’d had a slight limp when he came on to our ward, and I’d sadly diagnosed him in my head right away. Sixteen, just. No previous injuries. Near-constant knee pain. Bad enough to be presenting at a paediatric outpatients’ appointment. Osteosarcoma. Bone cancer. He took his jeans off and put a gown on. One knee was bigger than the other, by far, and that’s the moment I truly knew.

I sent him for a scan and watched him go, the limp more pronounced as he transferred from the pinkish grey carpet of our clinic to the vinyl of the hospital corridor. That’s where the journey continued for him – from it’s nothing; it’s bound to go soon; give it three weeks, to it’s something.

I didn’t see him for the rest of the day. Audrey’s husband, Amrit, and I had a Coke together in the afternoon. I told him about the boy. His eyes were sympathetic. And then I forgot about him. I had to; I always had too many patients, too much to do. But he reappeared, later, at seven o’clock in the evening. A cleaner was polishing the linoleum outside the CT room. The corridor smelt of wax and lemon.

‘Oh, hi,’ the boy’s mum said to me. She was putting a letter in her handbag. Her face was drawn. Her hair was messy at the scalp, as if she had been raking it back. She was wearing large hoop earrings, and her pale eyeshadow contrasted starkly with her black eyeliner.

‘I thought you’d be home by now,’ I said.

‘We got called in, after the scan …’ She frowned, confused at my lack of knowledge.

And that’s when I saw the confirmation. It was written somewhere on her frown lines, on the red-raw skin she’d peeled off around the nail of her right index finger, on the letter in her hand. You didn’t get letters if you were discharged. And I knew that she knew.

‘Your colleague. The junior doctor. He managed to see us. After the scan,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t good news.’

I nodded once.

The boy wasn’t looking at us. He was shuffling his cards.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I reached for her. I wanted to tell her everything I knew: that bone cancer was one of the better ones, that this might be a minor past event which he would reference casually in twenty years’ time to a shocked girlfriend, that now wouldn’t always feel this chaotic and shocking and out of control. Instead, I scribbled my mobile number on a blank prescription I had with me and handed it to her. ‘Any question. Any time,’ I said.

She didn’t look grateful. She wasn’t there yet. She wasn’t ready.

The boy looked up at me. His blue eyes were shining. ‘The doctor – the man doctor,’ he said. ‘He’s got Alan Gowling at home.’

‘Alan Gowling?’ I said, looking curiously at him.

The boy waved his stack of cards at me. ‘Newcastle centre forward. He’s going to bring it to my next appointment.’ He stopped and looked at me. ‘Is this serious?’ he said, less teenagerish, less sullen.

I looked at his mum.

‘We’ll see,’ she said.

Gillian McAllister

EVERYTHING BUT THE TRUTH

PENGUIN BOOKS

Part 1

WHO?

1

Present day

2

3

4

One year ago