Half-truths & White Lies

by Jane Davis

  Pairs of shoes conjured up an image of him sitting on the back step of the kitchen, all of his shoe-cleaning equipment laid out in a neat row in the required order on a piece of newspaper. He enjoyed the challenge of making an old pair of shoes look shiny and new almost as much as he enjoyed polishing the chrome of a bike or a car. This was a serious business to him. If you think of a doctor preparing for major surgery, you will get the picture. My father had a deep respect for tools of any sort and cared for them lovingly. Nothing was put away dirty or untidily. Everything had to be just so, exactly as he would need it the next time. When I wanted to 'help', he would allow me to pass him the right piece of cleaning equipment at the right time while he would whistle to me. I learned to whistle sitting next to my father on the back step of our house. In time, we mastered some simple duets, but when my father launched into his rendition of 'The Man who Sold the World' or 'Stairway to Heaven', I stopped to listen, hands cupping my face and elbows on knees. I thought that whistling was the extent of his musical talents, but it was magical to me.

  Jumpers represented Christmases gone by. Nana always bought a jumper for my dad for Christmas from Marks & Spencer, resplendent with snowflakes and reindeer. Most of them were rarely worn other than on the big day itself, safe in the knowledge that we were unlikely to leave the house. He would rip off the wrapping paper enthusiastically, pretend to be surprised and delighted, and strip off whatever he was wearing in front of us all to put on the new jumper. Sometimes he would deliberately put the new jumper on inside out and back to front and ask, 'What do you think? Isn't it terrific?' Sometimes he would pretend that his head was too big to fit through the hole and battle away until I went to help him. It was always my help that solved the problem. Sometimes his hands would emerge through the head hole in a digging motion followed by the top of his head. We knew this as his mole impression. Sometimes he would kneel on the floor, leaving the arms of the jumper dangling with his hands just visible from underneath the bottom edge, tensed into claws. He would alternately blink against the light and widen his eyes, hooting like a half-demented owl. Sometimes he would rotate the jumper through 90 degrees, put his head through so that his eyes were visible and his ears were pushed forward by the unforgiving neck and wave the empty sleeve about in front of his face, trumpeting like an elephant.

  'Oh, that's a lovely fit, Tom,' my mother would remark after the commotion was over, or, 'That's a good colour on you, Tom.' Anything to avoid actually saying, 'I will never, ever be seen in public with you wearing that,' or, 'Over my dead body will you leave this house wearing that thing.' My mother was always very particular about appearances. She felt that people would judge you by what you wore.

  'I've kept the receipt in case you want to change it,' Nana would say, beaming, lapping up all of the compliments about her choice. In those days, I would believe them too.

  'Change it, Brenda?' he would reply, horrified at the suggestion. 'Why on earth would I want to change it?'

  It became more and more difficult for my father to pretend that he liked the Christmas jumpers that hung unloved in his wardrobe. Eventually, my mother started to insist on taking Nana Christmas shopping and was able drag her away from the novelty jumpers. For the next two years my father was delighted to receive a cream Aran wool jumper and a chunky fisherman's jumper that he could genuinely enthuse about.

  'What did you say to the old boot?' I caught him asking my mother as they were canoodling in the kitchen. He always loved that word. Canoodling. Canoodling in the kitchen. There's a word that's just waiting to be caught misbehaving.

  'I asked her if she would prefer to buy you something you could wear the whole year round rather than just in December.'

  'Genius! And that's why I married you.'

  But Nana cast a disapproving eye over my father in his cream Aran. 'Are you sure that you don't want to change it for something a bit more colourful? I've kept the receipt.'

  For my part, I missed the ritual and the play acting. It is an unfortunate sign that you are growing up when you stop appreciating the beauty of cartoon ties and Christmas jumpers.

  I caved when I unfolded his overalls. Once white but never laundered, every stain represented a morning that we had spent together washing and polishing, peering into bonnets as my father showed me how to check the oil level and change the spark plugs, mending chains on bicycles and removing the innards of tyres to look for punctures, as all the while I pretended that I could recognize a subtle difference in the engine noise after my father had spent hours doing a spot of fine tuning. Listening to him talk about cars was like learning a foreign language. I understood most of the individual words but much of their meaning was lost on me. I didn't let on because I didn't want him to think that his enthusiastic explanations fell on deaf ears. The fact that parts of it eluded me made it all the more magical and mysterious. I spent most of my childhood trying to make up for the fact that I was just a stupid girl, even if it meant disappointing my mother. It seemed obvious to me that my father longed to have a son to play with and to teach.

  The world that I inhabited with my father was out in the back yard, the tool shed or the oil-stained drive at the front of the house. There was nothing that made me happier than to be told that I was too dirty to come into the house for lunch and being asked to undress at the back door, while my clothes were put straight into the washing machine. It was a matter of pride when my mother, in an attempt to save my 'good' clothes, went to Halfords and bought me a set of boy's overalls.

  While other fathers read their children bedtime stories, my father lulled me to sleep with the Haynes manual for whichever car he was working on at the time, pointing at diagrams and elaborating on the workings of carburettors. If he ever heard my mother coming up the stairs, he would proclaim loudly, 'And they all lived happily ever after,' or, 'And that's what happens if you go into the woods wearing a red cape,' while sitting on the manual he had been reading from. (I would always have a second book to hand in case she ever asked any awkward questions.) If she appeared in the doorway, he would then pretend to be surprised when he noticed her and say, 'I didn't see you there, love. You must stop creeping about like that.' I loved the secrets that we shared. It was almost as if my father and I were the children of the house, while my mother and Nana were the adults. He was as relieved as I was when he got away with something.

  'That was a close escape.' He would wink. 'They're always checking up on me.'

  'Me too,' I sympathized.

  'Well, you are only seven.'

  'How old are you, Daddy?'

  'Let me see. It was my birthday last April so that makes it seven thirty. Isn't it time you were asleep, Andrea Fellows?'

  'Have you forgotten your age again, Daddy?'

  'Yes. But it will have changed again by tomorrow, so there's no point worrying too much.'

  Behind his suit jackets, I found what I had been looking for. Something to link my middle-aged, balding father to the man I had seen in Uncle Pete's photograph album. A black leather jacket with The Spearheads painted on it in white amid a design of an eagle, feathers and arrows. Infused with the smell of beer and smoke, this was the jacket that Uncle Pete had described.

  I picked it up and felt the weight of it. Having seen the photograph album, it wasn't difficult to imagine my mother's eyes following my father down the road on the day that they met and Uncle Pete running after him in a vain attempt to impress the girl of his dreams, who would remain just that. I thought of the photos of my father singing, eyes closed with concentration, and of my mother focused on the stage, unaware of the camera, lost in the crowd. And I wished with all my heart that I had known those people.

  Chapter Ten

  It wasn't that I was uninterested in my mother's world. It was just that oil-stained overalls seemed far more accessible to me than the treasures of her dressing table. I was not a pretty child. When strangers met us and peered at me in my pushchair, the shapes of their mouths changed from the pre-prepared 'Ahh'
reserved for all babies and toddlers, to the uncertain surprise of an 'Oh', and they would enquire of my mother sympathetically, 'Takes after her father, does she?' Being a tomboy was an obvious choice.

  My mother could look glamorous with a rolled-up towel piled high on her head after washing her hair. And despite my father's constant assurances that she would look good in a bin liner, she had a keen sense of what suited her. She may have looked a million dollars, but when I was young she made her own clothes, shopping carefully for offcuts and ends of rolls after she had calculated exactly how much material she needed. Money was tight, and my mother was frugal but resourceful.

  I can remember the sound of heavy-handled pinking shears cutting through the fabric that she had marked out so carefully using a flat triangle of dressmakers' chalk; can picture her leaning over the table with a row of pins in her mouth, each with a different coloured head, spikes projected outwards. With my jaw still on the mend, I could do a reasonable impression of her warnings not to make her talk to save her from swallowing them. She demonstrated how to thread the sewing machine, concentration furrowing her forehead as the material passed under the needle. I loved the sheer magic of watching a dress take shape. I still do. Nothing bought in a shop ever fitted her the way that her handmade clothes did. She made sure of that, adding extra tucks where the pattern didn't result in the fit that she was looking for.

  I wasn't expecting to find anything old and filled with memories in my mother's side of the wardrobe. Once she grew tired of her clothes they were demoted to dressing-up material or recycled into something new for me. An unworn dress and jacket bought for a wedding that hadn't yet taken place brought a lump to my throat. She would have hated the waste of it. I wondered if I should put them on one side for Aunty Faye as the sisters were the same dress size, although they would both say 'same size, different shape' when asked if they had ever thought of sharing clothes. The real issue was not one of body shape but of taste.

  I worked my way ruthlessly through her wardrobe, not daring to stop and look at individual items. After I had finished I sat on the padded stool at her dressing table facing the silver-framed photograph of the three of us, me in the middle, gap-toothed and grinning, flanked by Mum and Dad. It had been her favourite family portrait. I must have been about seven, which would have made her thirty-one, him thirty-two. We had visited Russell's Photography Studio and Mr Russell had taken twenty separate poses before he got a single shot where one of us wasn't squinting or pulling a face.

  'He can't be very good,' I had whispered far too loudly within Mr Russell's earshot, 'Uncle Pete always gets it right first time.'

  Uncle Pete roared when my father told him that, and picked me up to kiss me on the cheek. 'And I'd have been cheap at half the price. Who's my clever girl? Let's see if I've got anything in my magic pockets for you.'

  I looked at myself in the central mirror, while the side mirrors reflected unfamiliar angles of my face, somehow making it clearer which features I have inherited from each parent. Although as a younger child I was told I was 100 per cent Fellows, I grew to look more like my mother's side of the family. I've heard it said that nature has organized things so that babies resemble their fathers for the first two years of their lives. This is meant to prevent the fathers from disowning them and leaving. Nana frequently reminded me when I was a little girl that everyone is beautiful at some point in their lives, and that it was not my time yet. She liked to tell me the story of the Ugly Duckling as if this would offer some comfort, but the message it reinforced was that people will love you if you're beautiful, and that those who are not blessed in the looks department were going to have a pretty rough time of it. The only place where I was number one was at home, where I always knew that I was loved.

  'You look just like your Aunty Faye when she was your age,' my mother would tell me as she brushed my bushy hair until she was halfway happy with it. 'It's funny how looks run in families that way. If you ever have a cousin, she's going to be just like you.'

  'Do you think I look like Daddy?'

  'Well, of course, you look like your daddy too!' She swooped to kiss me. 'You're a cross between my absolute two favourite people, so that makes you my number-one girl.' Sometimes she would hug me to her so tightly that all of the breath was forced out of me and I would gasp for air. When she let go, she would have tears in her eyes.

  'Why are you crying, Mummy?'

  'Oh, I'm not sad, darling.' She would dab her eyes. 'These are happy tears. Do you know how much we love you, baby?'

  My teens were tough for me, not because I suffered from greasy hair and acne like some of the girls at school, but because exactly the opposite happened. I was so used to my own image of myself that I didn't even notice it. It wasn't just the new underwear, clothes and make-up that my mother encouraged me to experiment with. At some point between the ages of twelve and fourteen, I became attractive. I wasn't as pleased as I should have been. It had delighted my father that I began life as a tomboy. He never really got over the fact that I got breasts. C cups. We had to stop hugging because they got in the way. I was embarrassed by his embarrassment, almost apologetic. I tried to strap them in place with sports bras, but occasionally, when I was alone in the house, I would take off my top in front of the mirror on my mother's dressing table – the only way of looking at myself from different angles – to get a better idea of what they looked like. My mother had clearly always enjoyed her shape. I hated mine. It took me years to feel comfortable in my adult body.

  To the right of the dressing table, a glass jar of cotton wool balls sat next to a bottle of Johnson's Baby Lotion – she said she loved the smell of babies – and her Oil of Olay. A spray can of Impulse. A bottle of expensive bath oil that seemed to be for display purposes only. Pond's Cold Cream. Silvikrin Hairspray. Lavender-scented talcum powder. Astral hand cream. She was faithful to her little rituals. These were the products that she had used as a teenager and that she bought for me until I took more of an interest and replaced them with other brands. I lined them up, rotating the labels until they faced the front. Turning my mother's hairbrush over in my hand, I looked at the stray hairs still tangled in it, honey-blonde against the red cushion. She had taken her make-up bag with her that wretched weekend and I hadn't yet found the courage to unpack the bag of belongings that had been returned to me sealed in clear plastic, but spare nail polishes and lipsticks in various shades of reds lay in a small wicker basket. I used to love watching her put on her face. It didn't work if I sat on her lap as she had to lean so far forward to apply the mascara and draw a perfect line on her upper lid that she was almost touching the mirror. I would be pushed outwards. It was all right if she was just doing a quick touch-up with powder. Lipstick, blot, then a second coat, blow kisses in the mirror. I never understood why you would put lipstick on and then blot it off again. It seemed a complete waste of effort.

  My mother was always more of a mystery to me than my father. Occasionally, her eyes would glaze over with a distant look and she would literally switch off her senses. Even if you were standing right next to her, she wouldn't be able to hear a word you said. My father called it her 'selective hearing', but it was almost as if she was in a trance. If you waved something in front of her face, she would snap out of it instantly, sometimes a little cross. When I was small and couldn't reach up high enough, my daddy would pretend he had hypnotized her and that only he could bring her back by snapping his fingers and saying, 'Bananas, bananas, bananas.' That way, if she was annoyed, it would be with him and not me.

  Having straightened everything out, I found a cardboard box and swept everything into it with one movement of my right arm. Half-used cosmetics. No good to anyone, but I couldn't bear to simply throw them out.

  I decided to take the same approach with her underwear drawer. It didn't seem decent to do anything else. I removed the drawer and turned round, still seated, to upend the entire contents on to the bed. Bending down to gather up the debris scattered around my feet,
I noticed half a dozen photographs among the cotton and silk. Looking at the heap on the bed, I realized that the drawer had been lined with paper and that the photos must have been hidden underneath. There were still more on top of the mound on the bed, face downwards.

  I perched on the edge to gather them up like a deck of cards, then turned the first one over slowly as if I was examining a hand. It was a typical photo of a newborn baby. The colour had faded, but there was no confusing the child in the photo with me. People may tell you that all babies look alike, but in this case it was not correct. I was born with a shock of hair that promptly fell out and left me bald until I was nearly two but this child had a neat little tuft of damp, dark hair. There was a peacefulness about the look on its face that made me wonder if I was looking at a photo of my stillborn brother. What other photos would be so private that they would be hidden away from inquisitive eyes? I almost felt ashamed to be prying.

  The next photo was similar, but the baby's hands were clenched close to its face. Large hands with fingers facing the camera, a healthy hint of pink in the nails. I turned the next photo over. This showed my mother sitting up in bed, hair loose, pale-faced but beaming, a white bundle in her arms. Next, a close up of her face from the side against the child's, a tangle of hair escaping from behind her ear, the beginnings of crows' feet just visible. The baby is open-mouthed, face straining with effort at the discovery of the power of his lungs. This was no stillborn child. This was one healthy baby. There were several more shots of my mother, counting fingers and toes, cooing, kissing the child's forehead. Then came the shot that I was not expecting. Perhaps the most natural thing in the world – a couple sitting on a hospital bed, holding the tiny child up in the centre of the shot: my mother and a far younger, slimmer version of Uncle Pete.

  I shuffled through the rest of the photos looking for the shots with my father in them, the pictures of me seeing my younger brother for the first time, the Fellows family photographs. There were none.