White Lies Read Online Free PDF

living room, a week-old baby in my arms.
    And alone.
    I thought it wouldn’t be for long. I thought she’d come back. I thought then that this terror would last no longer than a few days.
    The night I took Matthew home from the hospital was longer than a night had any right to be. The house was all at once unfamiliar, as though Heather had taken with her the essence of what had made it mine.
    I drop into this young, uncertain body and begin to sway without realising it - a pendulous movement that doesn’t need to be learned. I avoid looking at the baby as I walk slow circles around the living room, trying to find something that truly belongs to me, trying to find an anchor.
    Windows filmed with condensation. A fat sponge on the sill, waiting for its morning work. Heather’s work. I would leave the glass unwiped until black blossoming mould began to creep across the panes. The curtains hang open, unlined, because Heather loathed her sewing machine and told it so whenever she hauled it onto the kitchen table. Above the mantelpiece the sunburst clock that I can’t stand glows bronze in the low light, an instrument of auditory torture. Heather’s choice, or was it a gift from her mother? A blanket embroidered with Matthew’s initials lies rumpled on the sofa in the shape of a mountain range. The house is full of baby things. They conspire against me and pile into corners – I do not recognise any of it, not the booties, the bottles, the bibs, the bassinette – Heather’s choice, Heather’s choice, Heather’s choice. I wonder if she had started to systematically remove me from the house long before Matthew arrived.
    He stirs in my arms, heavy with awkwardness. I do not want to put him down in case he breaks. I do not want him to cry again because that was worse than any stroke, any heart attack - electricity running through his lungs into my nervous system. He had wailed without warning, an acute note of outrage at crossing the threshold from the front step to the hallway. There was no-one to consult, no-one to look to, no-one to take half of the knifing noise into their ears. The house rang with the sound and I felt nothing but pity for myself.
    My aged self slips quietly into my younger body and forces my eyes downwards, to the little face turned away from the street light, turned in, to the valley between my chest and my arm. I am struck by how much the baby Matthew looks like the man, how I didn’t know then how he would look when he was grown. Now, it is just so obvious. There’s the eye, the lip, the hairline, the ear. The fluency of handling a child sweeps through me and I adjust him so that he lies across my arm, legs dangling, cheek squashing his mouth into a questioning O. He settles once more, a dead weight.
    I walk through the house from front to back, something I didn’t do the first time I was here. I squint into the darkness of the kitchen windows, wondering if his mother is out there, if she came to see him this night, crouching behind the garden hedge, peering into the lighted rooms while we paced. Or whether she was already far from here.
    Matthew slept for five hours, woke at three to nuzzle a bottle of milk and went back to sleep. Thirty-five years ago I managed, eventually, to put him down - clumsily swaddled in the Moses basket Heather had taken forty minutes to choose over the other almost identical option in the shop. I had only touched him to feed him, supporting his swollen head like I was told to, wiping the white tracks that flowed from the corners of his mouth and burping him until he threw most of it back up on my shoulder. This time my young hands are made strong with the gift of being possessed by my elderly self. Two hands, intact and steady. I nestle him into my chest, breathe a soft Edelweiss into his ear, humming when I don’t know the words, rhyming bright with light, white, night. New lyrics about hearts rising and falling, fall and rise forever. He doesn’t mind. Alice knew