White Lies Read Online Free PDF Page B

the right words and he’d learn them from her in time.
    But I can feel the link fading, my ghost losing weight, drawn by the magnetism of the door to the hall. Another door. Another time left behind. I know what happens next and I must move onwards, ever on. The new father’s fear begins to take hold again, a nauseous twist, a collapsing tunnel. He will be alright. I promise him that as I close the door behind me.
    #
    Heather’s mother came by at six in the morning and I knew that she hadn’t slept either, watching the clock until it was an almost acceptable time to come over, until the milkman had been, at least, until commuters were leaving houses and trains running sleepily from their bunkers.
    “Where’s the little soldier?” Alice shouted as she came through the door that first morning, flinging off gloves and layers, dumping bags of yet more baby things across the hallway. I pointed to the living room where he still slept and made a cup of tea. Matthew woke for Alice and squinted indifferently at her as she made all the appropriate noises and her skin shone, flushed, as though she had just run a mile.
    “Wait ’til your mama gets home, little man,” I heard her whisper, over the boiling of the kettle, “It’ll be love at first sight.” I didn’t point out that Heather had already missed that opportunity.
    I put up with that kind of talk for three weeks. Constant reassurance starts to grate after a while. “When your mama sees how
big
you’ve got, little one,” and “Won’t your mama be proud of you, drinking up all your milk?” I put up with it until the police told me the negative correlation between the time a person is missing and the chance of finding them alive. They told Alice too but she snapped her head to the side like a toddler refusing a spoon. “You don’t know my daughter,” she’d said to them. For a second I thought she was talking to me.
    By the time he was a month old we had become used to our awkward routine. Alice finished the decoration of his little bedroom - not much more than a glorified cupboard, strung up with a sheep mobile and an alphabet cross-stitch wall hanging. It smelled of Alice even when she wasn’t there, soft and clean and warm and motherly. He struggled in my arms, as though I was coarse all over. He threw himself away from me, coiling backwards like he was in pain. I stood in the doorway of my bedroom and watched as she changed him, dressing him up for a walk to the shop, cooing: wouldn’t his mama love to see him looking so smart in his dungarees? Her hands moved with surety, anticipating each involuntary movement with practised ease in a way mine wouldn’t learn until I was able to try again with Alex.
    Matthew had begun to watch everything with dark, unblinking, gullible eyes – finally acclimatised to this bright, loud world – as though he knew something was not quite right and had decided to start taking stock.
    “You look like a little sailor boy,” Alice told him. “Oh… the big ship sails on the ally-ally-oh… ” She thought he had started to smile but I read in one of Heather’s baby books that it was probably just wind. The boy stood with her assistance, legs a year away from supporting his own weight, chin doubling – tripling – into his chest as his head flopped forward. He threw himself backwards so he could look at me. Alice made him dance and laughed at her little puppet.
    “Your mama used to love that one too. She’ll sing it to you when she gets back.”
    I stumbled then, even though I had been standing still. There was the limit. Once I reached beyond it, I never found a way back to the silence of before. The quiet of denial. And if I couldn’t have that falsified peace then I could make sure no-one else could either. My yell made them both startle: “Stop telling him she’ll come home!”
    Matthew wailed. Alice looked away.
    “Don’t promise him things that you can’t make true,” I said, quieter. “Don’t do it to