Free White Lies by Jo Gatford Page B

remember her.
    Angela wears Lydia’s rings. She sits looking at the backs of her hands as if she has just realised they are turning into her mother’s. Her nails have hardened and grooved with the years, and she has even begun to file them into the same shape as Lydia’s - rounded points of a sensible length. The only sensible thing about Lydia was her fingernails, I suppose.
    No wedding band for Angela. She took her mother’s advice, even though Lydia ignored it herself, twice. We were each other’s second spouse and happy never to discuss Matthew’s mother or Angie’s dad. I was an exception, Lydia said.
    “We were made to make babies, not to make families. You were better off without a dad like him,” I heard her tell her daughter once. “And Alex, too.”
    Instead, Lydia said, she had chosen me. I hoped Angela hadn’t bothered to study me as an example of a father. I was always tired. I couldn’t help with maths homework. I never apologised when I shouted. And I was shouting, scarlet-faced and sweating, the first time she saw me, calling her mum a silly cow for crashing her car into mine at the crossroads outside Matthew’s nursery. I yanked Matthew out of his seat, crushed him to my chest, yelling, “You bloody fool woman!” as I ran round to Lydia’s car but she was clutching her own child, sobbing sorry, sorry, sorry. Angela and Matthew looked at each other and then up at us, and it was as if they knew.
    Lydia used to ask men for directions to places she knew how to get to, just so she could flirt in gratitude. She’d leave her purse on the counter in the newsagent’s so that the long-haired, dark-eyed salesman would run down the street to return it to her, and she would blush and gabble and he would touch her arm and say it was no problem. He would look nervously to me but there was nothing I could do. Flirting was her default form of communication. I often wondered if Angela’s mother had spotted me long before she drove her car into the side of mine. And a little less than nine months later, Alex was born.
    An echo of a song flaps through the door as it closes behind an old woman and her nurse; someone singing louder than is socially acceptable in a corridor that rolls the sound back in thrumming resonance. The nurse nods to Angela in some sort of carer’s solidarity, or perhaps it’s a secret signal. The old woman pauses when the nurse stops her, walks when the nurse gently nudges her forward. They sit to the right of us and the woman closes down; chin to chest, hands in lap, knees falling open. The nurse fishes in her handbag for gum. Angela shuffles closer to me, lays her hand on my thigh and quickly removes it again. We are so very bad at affection. One thing we have in common.
    At three, Matthew was a little watery-eyed silent thing who liked to sit as close as humanly possible to Angela on the sofa - hip bones sticking into her thighs, his arm squashed up against her side, head a few bare inches away from resting on her shoulder. He never made it that far, though he seemed to long to do so.
    Lydia would roll her eyes and pull us into rough hugs, kissing our ears, leaving bells ringing inside. Alex would climb up legs and onto laps and throttle us with love, his open-mouthed kisses full of teeth. I patted heads and nodded solemnly, the sort of expression to be adopted when confronted with something I don’t know how to react to. I can feel the frown clamping at my muscles now as the doctor leans around her doorway and asks us to come through. But her doorway has no magic, I can tell, and I don’t move until Angela prods me in the fat underneath my arm.
    My doctor is younger than Angela, with deep brown skin and eyes whose irises are almost as dark as her pupils. I may be no good at physical contact but something about her manner makes me want to crawl into a ball on her lap. I’m fairly sure she would be too polite and professional to mind. Doctor Samyal consults her notes, smiling every