White Lies by Jo Gatford Page A

up with me at the foyer I don’t let her slow me down. I know exactly where I’m going. She follows me unobtrusively out of the clinic and all the way to the high street shoe shop that used to be a travel agency where Heather once worked. I sit on one of the chairs with my feet on a foot-measuring stool and ask the shop assistant if she knew, if she was even aware that this place used to be a travel agency. If she knew that Heather worked here. A bit of accounting, that’s what she did. And some secretarial duties. She hated it. She hated everything, by the end. The shop assistant didn’t know, and she shakes her head with a slow, patient, painfully tolerant expression. Angela sits down next to me and waits quietly until I allow her to persuade me to go back to the home.
    #
    I don’t remember dinner, or getting into my pyjamas, or taking my medication, but when the resonance of Heather’s workplace finally leaves me I find myself sitting up in my bed, steeped in the catnip stink of my room, with the ocean-sounds radio set to some sort of waterfall. It is as if I have been dug up and replanted, like a sickly tree. Perhaps if you put it in the shade at the back by the fence it will survive, and if it dies you won’t notice, it won’t be missed.
    I may be falling asleep or I may be falling through some sort of horizontal doorway, but all I can keep hold of is the image of a woman I thought I once knew. Perhaps I saw her in the shoe shop, or out of the window of the car, or in the conservatory back at The Farm House - a woman, a witch, a figment of an untethered imagination. She remains when I close my eyes, threading a voice through the hair inside my ears, telling a story that I’ve heard before, to the rhythm of a bleating heartbeat:
    A prince. Waiting for his execution. And a bell, ringing a hole in his head as he sat in his stone cell and swore instead of prayed at the dirt under his feet.
    A woman. Standing the wrong side of the locked door. Brown toothed, swarthy, and twisted like willow. A witch, almost certainly.
    “Evening,” she said, with a voice like a broken back.
    There were no windows in his cell but the chill of the sunset had reached him hours before. He raised a princely eyebrow at her but she said nothing more until he asked, “What is it you want from me?”
    “Your fear,” she replied.
    He did not understand. The incessant bell tolled reason and thought out of his brain with each sweet-toned peal.
    “I’m not afraid,” he muttered, not even believing it himself.
    “Don’t you want to know how they’ll do it?” she asked coquettishly.
    The prince forced himself to sit up straight, to the fullest height he could manage while shackled to the wall. He had a proud chin - his portraits, now pulled down from the walls of the palace and replaced with his usurper, had always captured it well.
    The woman had magic. In the earthen floor she drew visions of his end: the desperate silence of a hanging, the heated knife disembowelling and castrating, the bubble and pitch of burning alive. He kicked the images away like a drowning man jerking his last.
    She watched his bloodless face, the battering pattern of his heart. “No fear?” she said.
    The prince shook his head once each side.
    “Well then,” she sniffed, “I’ll leave you to your death.”
    As she turned away, he wondered how she would leave – how indeed she got inside – with no keys, with no sign that the guard outside his cell had any idea she was even there. “Wait,” he said. He didn’t feel strong enough to witness a woman walking through a solid door.
    “Yes?”
    “I am,” he said slowly. “Afraid. I’m terrified.”
    She smiled.
    “I can make it all disappear.”
    And she did. And it did.
    #
    The beeping won’t stop. I am standing at the foot of Mother Whistler’s bed and though her lips aren’t moving I can hear her voice as clear as the bells of the prison tower.
    “Is this what you wanted?” she asks.
    I shake