White Lies by Jo Gatford Page A

doctors chicken-and-egged the dementia and the stroke, agreeing eventually that they had most likely conspired hand in hand to floor him; to take away coherent speech for a week and a half; to insert a tremor into his knees when he stood alone. Over the next seven months he got worse at hiding the anomalies and mistakes, and eagle-eyed Angela knew exactly what to look for. Then he forgot where he kept the baked beans and I betrayed him.
    The paramedics picked him up off the crematorium floor and Angela went with him to the hospital as I watched my brother’s body roll down the conveyor to the fire and Clare gripped my arm so tight she left fingerprint bruises.

Chapter Ten
    The doorways are getting closer together. Some days each one I pass through will take me somewhere new, somewhere old, somewhere grey. And I am getting slower, less able to escape the siren’s hum of the doors when they call. I am doubly crippled these days; one arm clamped inside a ridiculous plaster appendage, and the other missing a hand. Some doors lead back to a time of plenty: eight fingers, two thumbs, two hands, two wives, three children. I judge by the sweetness of the air whether it will be a joyful journey or a penance. These days, mostly, it is the latter.
    Tonight a slow shuffle through the bathroom doorway leaves me shivering on the other side, standing head-bowed outside a garden shed, thirty years before my prostate nags me to urinate six times a night. For a moment all I can feel is a nameless gut-wrenching guilt before the rest comes into focus, before I properly gauge where I am. Then memory moves my hand to action and I slip the shed key underneath a rhubarb pot so Lydia won’t find it. She’s not like Heather, who would always defer to me in any situation requiring a spade or power tools. Lydia is far more inclined to just grab a hammer and get stuck in. I know hiding the key is futile but under the pot it goes. My body moves without me willing it, as if I’m not even inside.
    I can see my neighbour Graham pulling up leeks next door. My knees pop as I straighten up and he looks over, calling “Peter.” Hearing his voice stops me like a bullet.
    I can’t help but grin to unnerve him. I let the awkwardness settle before heading for the back door.
    “Peter? Do you want some of these?” he says, and I can’t stop myself from glancing back to see him hoisting a handful of soily leeks over the fence.
    “We’re okay, thanks.” We are okay. We don’t need his leeks.
    “I’ve got a glut. Have some.”
    My memory says that I refused them with a shake of my head and a backwards wave but this time I am fuelled by thirty-five years of rage and I stop and turn and stare. Graham’s face glows pink in the low light. I study his features for a moment, something I never would have done before; I always found it so hard to look him in the eye. My body tries to move but I force it into submission by convincing it that its feet are pegged to the ground. It twitches, conflicted. I tell it to behave or I’ll piss myself. I never did make it to the bathroom back in the nursing home.
    Graham watches me, arm still outstretched, vegetables dangling flaccidly from his hands. I jog over to take the cold leeks from him and grainy earth tumbles down into my sleeve. “Thank you,” I say.
    “Not a problem.”
    I’m stuck again, cradling the leeks in my arms, smiling with no trace of pleasantry at my increasingly disturbed neighbour. He clears his throat. “So… ”
    “What?”
    Graham tries to make it sound nonchalant: “That time of year again.”
    I pretend I don’t know what he means. “November? Yep, it seems to happen every year.”
    He falters. Makes a new attempt: “Matthew’s birthday.”
    “Saturday.”
    “Ahh. Five?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Five years… ” he says, like a wistful grandfather, like he knows what it’s like to have an almost five-year-old.
    I wait for the rest. His mouth opens and shuts like a faulty