White Lies Read Online Free Page B

the table and loitered uncertainly, waiting for him to notice her and put down his utensils.
    “Take it home then,” Angela said, “we can ask for a doggy bag.”
    “Jesus, Mum. Stop trying to force-feed me. I don’t want it. I’m sorry. I didn’t even want to come.” She flicked her eyes momentarily up to mine in apology. I smiled my first genuine smile of the evening back at her.
    I could feel the ache of my niece’s embarrassment as she shrank in her seat under the scrutiny of the entire table. Angela had adopted Dad’s hardness rather than her mum’s laissez-faire approach to parenting. Clare’s bland ‘kill-me-now’ expression felt so familiar, as if there weren’t sixteen years between us. The reverberating noises of the other diners seemed to close in even more tightly as Angela watched her face for submission and tried to ignore Dad’s incessant fork-turning. A meatball rolled off his plate, across the table and into her handbag. The waitress stifled a squeak and fished it out with seamless professionalism.
    “Let me just take that, shall I?” she said to Dad, sweeping his plate onto the carefully balanced arrangement on her arm and leaving him with a redundant fork, dangling with cold noodles.
    “What’s wrong with you?” Angela hissed at Clare.
    “How about some ice cream?” the waitress suggested enthusiastically, as though Clare was a decade younger.
    “No. Thank you,” Clare said politely. Then, to her mother, a vicious whisper: “I feel sick, okay?”
    “Leave her alone, Angie!” Dad boomed, and the conversation in the restaurant fell into a sudden curious lull. “She’s not bloody hungry.” As the noise gradually and uncertainly returned to half its previous level, he reached for the wine bottle and filled his empty water glass.
    “Peter, you shouldn’t, not with your medication - ” Angela said, and the waitress’ smile fell a few millimetres, her eyes fixed on the fork still in Dad’s fist.
    Dad knocked back the wine like it was a shot and ceremoniously tossed his fork into the empty glass. The waitress swiped it away and quickly retreated to the kitchen. Peter raised a finger, as if we were all still mid-conversation: “And I’m not the only one who had the decency to keep quiet about things that don’t need to be discussed in the middle of a bloody restaurant.” He jabbed the finger into the table in front of Angela, “
Your
mother could keep a secret, I’ll tell you that now.”
    “Fucking hell,” I said.
    “She might not have been honest, but she kept her mouth shut.”
    “Okay, we’re going home,” Angela said, face flushed and downturned, aware that the people at the tables around us had stopped talking.
    “You mean,
you’re
going home.
I’m
going back to that nuthouse.”
    “Peter!”
    Clare lurched forward in her seat, the skin of her face almost translucent with a sudden draining of blood, “I’m going to be sick,” she said, and bolted for the bathroom.
    “I’ll go with her,” Sabine offered, but the screeching of Angela’s chair on the tile floor stopped her.
    “No,” Angela snapped, “I’ll go. You two get him outside.”
    “Cart the old man off, that’s right,” Dad said, shoving his chair backwards and steadying himself on the table. “Where’s Alex?” he asked – the first of what was to be innumerable times – not that we knew it then. “I thought Alex was coming.”
    “Dad, shut up,” I said, as I scooped up coats and bags and tried to head him off before he toppled into the diners next to them.
    “Don’t tell your dad to shut up,” Sabine said. And that was the moment, I reflected later, that it was probably all over for us.
    We weaved Dad through the maze of tables to the front door, no time for embarrassment as we focused solely on avoiding knocking over any glasses or bumping into passing waiters, while my dad grumbled and protested at our treatment. As we passed the door to the toilets we could hear Clare’s