A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  I asked my mother about it. I must have felt guilty about being so damned healthy.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you were a blue baby. We didn’t know how things would turn out.’ She gave me an inquisitive look. ‘What has your father been saying?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘He was just telling me about Elizabeth–’

  ‘Well, you know about that,’ she said. ‘She was our first baby, and she died. So we had you instead.’ Even when I was very young, I knew she meant this well, but her words did nothing to make up for what my father had told me. It still sounded like I was second-best.

  ‘What’s a blue baby?’

  ‘It’s when – I don’t know. You had to be looked after by a specialist.’ She pronounced this word with all the reverence people of her class reserved for medical professionals. ‘You had to be put in an oxygen tent, when you were first born.’

  I tried to picture an oxygen tent. I knew oxygen was part of the air. When I was older, I decided I had been strangely privileged by this oxygen-rich birth, as if I had come into the world with sky in my lungs.

  ‘Anyway,’ she would always conclude, ‘don’t listen to your father. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, half the time.’

  I nodded. I knew she was right, but I wasn’t sure which half of the time I should ignore. If it had been all the time, I think I would have managed better. But things were never that straightforward. All his best lies were half-truths – I suppose the grain of truth in each of his stories helped him to remember, if not the lesser details, then at least the general arc of the plot – which meant there was something there to be sifted out, something that might have revealed him to me. I suppose, at the time, I wasn’t quite ready to give up on that possibility – as my mother so obviously had.

  I still don’t really know what a blue baby is. At the time, I thought it meant that, when I was born, I almost died. This, oddly enough, was something of a comfort to me: it was something I had in common with my ghost sister, something special. It was as if a part of the soul I’d had at birth had been traded off for my earthly survival, as if part of me had gone into the beyond with Elizabeth. I’m told blue baby syndrome is fairly uncommon nowadays, that a blue baby is a child born with a congenital heart defect that causes a bluish coloration of the skin. Sometimes it happens that red blood cells in the infant’s blood are destroyed by the mother’s antibodies, and this can also cause cyanosis. Whatever the cause, my problems could not have been serious, because I was soon at home and, according to family lore, my father was dandling me on his knee, singing me old songs, delighted with his new son.

  I hear these memories, like stories being told in my head, but I never see them. Growing up, I was always anxious about memory, at some undercurrent level: it wasn’t, for me, a philosophical question, when I asked myself what a memory was, and why my own memories were usually so vague. When somebody said to me that they could see some incident happening in their mind’s eye, I had no idea what they meant. Was it like a film, running on some screen behind the eyes? Was it only a figure of speech? Why did one thing – a smell, a taste – suggest something else – a moment, a girl’s face – when there was no obvious connection between the two? Was I defective in some way? I remembered – I still remember – so little. I have a very weak notion of time. An hour can pass without my noticing. A day can pass. Or a single minute can seem to go on for ever. This was true then, and it was more exquisite because, as a child, I was never sure I would emerge from a moment’s foundering, just I was never sure where the time had gone, when an hour, or a day, skipped by.

  I do know, however, that my first real visual memory is of Smokey the Cat. The dilapidated houses on King Street were pretty thoroughly infested with rats and house mice. I’m told that this never bothered me, that my mother found me in the garden one afternoon, when I was three years old, watching a rat foraging around the coal bunker, and she noticed that I wasn’t afraid, just fascinated. I have no recollection of this, naturally. What I do remember is that my mother had a horror of all animals: rats, mice, cats, dogs, horses, cattle. She was also worried about the risk of disease the rats posed – with one dead child, a blue baby and, in the year or so before we left King Street, a new baby girl to look after – she wanted to be rid of them. The irony was that, according to the accepted wisdom, the only reliable method of eliminating rats in such conditions was to go out and get a terrier, or a cat.

  Which is where Smokey came in. My mother agreed to having him out of necessity, but she didn’t like the idea. Naturally, Smokey sensed this immediately and decided he wanted to be my mother’s special friend: no matter what she did, he would follow her around, or jump suddenly into her lap when she sat knitting. Worst of all, he would bring her little gifts: half-dead mice; songbirds; even, on one occasion, a large, rather lean rat that lay twitching on the floor till she gave Smokey permission to finish it off. I think she did her best to appear gracious, but the outcome was preordained from the first: disgusted woman, disappointed cat. My mother never did understand the concept of pets. She found it deeply unsettling that a cat could mistake her, at some basic level, for its own kin. At the same time, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for the rats and, no matter how hard she tried to disguise this sympathy, the cat usually got the sense that all was not well, and so felt – who knows what a cat feels? Betrayed, was how it looked. Still, it never gave up. For as long as we lived on King Street, that animal followed my mother around with its tender, half-killed gifts. When we finally moved, Smokey did not come with us. I think he suspected it was some kind of trick to finally rid him of his hunting instinct. Or maybe he guessed that, where we were going, we had no use for him, and he didn’t want us to forget him by degrees till, like most cats, he finally became invisible. After we moved, after we had settled, we noticed that he was gone, but nobody missed him.

  Nobody, that is, except my father. He went out from time to time to try and find out where the cat had gone. King Street wasn’t far away, and he would begin his search at our old house, checking the gardens round about, then tracing a path past the shops and on to the farm road, then up through the beech woods, past Kirk’s chicken farm on the left and the dense woods on the right. He did that for quite a while, but he never found Smokey. I remember finding it a little strange: for as long as Smokey had been there, taken for granted, my father had paid him only the most passing attention, but now that the animal was lost, he couldn’t quite put him out of his mind.

  CHAPTER 3

  Our new house was on Blackburn Drive, a sprawl of wartime prefabs close to the edge of Cowdenbeath and separated somewhat from the rest of the town by the Beath woods. At that time, the woods were a narrow strip of mixed trees, mostly beech, and the kind of undergrowth associated with that fairly dark woodland, invaded here and there, where trees had been cleared, by great swathes of rosebay willowherb and even, where it was moist, by Himalayan balsam. A damp, stony track that everybody called the farm road cut through the woods, running all the way from the Co-op and the little corner shop where my father bought his cigarettes, past the old abattoir, skirting Kirk’s poultry farm on the way, and finally emerging, beyond the prefabs, to meet the Old Perth Road. Beyond that, there was nothing but open fields, and the odd derelict farm building, till you got to the place we kids called the Water Houses, a dark, mysterious set of sheds and storehouses that, to my mind, was both deeply sinister and infinitely exciting. I spent a good deal of time at the Water Houses, mostly because I had been forbidden ever to go near them. I spent as much time out in the woods and wetlands beyond, searching for moorhens’ nests, or gathering blueberries. It’s all gone now, of course: the woods, the prefabs, the chicken farm, the old slaughterhouse. The fields have been turned over to a light industrial estate; the Water Houses have collapsed. As a child, I thought Beath woods were magical: so close to home, yet so dark and damp, they were haunted by tawny owls and foxes; haunted, too, by strange noises and movements in the dark that nobody cou
ld explain. When I was around seven, I took to getting up on summer nights, after my parents had gone to bed, and sitting out on the window sill, listening to the owls, spooked by their weird cries, even more spooked by the fact that, no matter how close they sounded, I never saw them.

  The woods further out were a different story. People went to those woods for all sorts of reasons: in the daytime, illicit couples stole up through the fields and into the undergrowth to lie, half naked and silent, coupling like joyous animals; after school, or on the weekends, gangs of older boys would hold secret drinking sessions, or they would haul a sack of trapped cats into the darker corners for arcane torture ceremonies. (I was present at some of these, by accident, before I was really old enough to be admitted, and I saw what was done. It was surprisingly casual, and surprisingly cruel. Those ceremonies involved rope, fire, fish-hooks, penknives and various brands of household cleaning products.) To go there alone, in the middle of the day, was to enter a dangerous realm of spent bonfires and burned fur, the half-decomposed bodies of unclaimed dogs, farmers with shotguns, stark displays of rats and crows, carefully suspended in the branches of elder or thorn bushes from pieces of muddy baling twine, like somebody’s bizarre idea of avant-garde sculpture. I went there as often as I could. This was the place where I learned the deep pleasure of being alone, of being out in the open with an angel-haunted sky over my head, and the damp earth, packed tight with tubers and seeds and the bodies of the dead, under my feet. All that time, I was engaged in that search a childhood sometimes becomes, a search for the perfect instrument, for some compass point, some line of cold steel, some buried filament of copper and smoked glass. I didn’t know what it did; maybe it guided the trains through town, west to the rain, or north, into deeper snows. Once found, it might turn boys into something more interesting and much stranger than the handful of men I knew; perhaps it simply existed, part of the beautiful machinery of the world, calibrated, steady, hidden, uniting the human realm with all that lay beyond. It was imaginary – but it was more real than the business of school and home and minding my father; it was also very specific to me, something I alone could imagine, something I alone could find. I was a pit-town child, escaping into the woods or the wet meadows for the afternoon, entering a world that I knew must belong to somebody else and, at the same time, quite sure that those others had no right to it. I made it up in words I took from books: windflower, sorrel, pipit, old man’s beard; I didn’t really know anything, but I wanted to. All the time, I knew something else was there, waiting to arrive and touch me. When all the names I knew from memory and textbooks, all the world I thought to see had been assigned, another life began, crossing a field, fording a burn, stepping out on to the further bank and coming to light, but not quite taking shape: a running fox, a wind-gust in the grass, the dense, communal silence of beasts. Rabbit and weasel, wed to their mortal dance; the farmer’s cat, out stalking in the weeds; his ewes and cattle turning from a dream of salt and hay to where the earth began. It was darker and more dangerous than that, but you wouldn’t see it at first; then, when the perfect moment came, it would take hold of your spirit, and you would never be the same again.

  In those days, being a child was all about navigation. At eight years of age, my entire body was a map, a nerve chart of dogs and fruit trees, and the places where bottles might be found, to be rinsed out later and redeemed at Brewster’s for a penny or two. My homeward routes were records of the movements of bullies, of teachers and priests, of beautiful strangers. At the same time, it was always a dress rehearsal for something else, something beyond my knowledge. When I was nine I ran away for the first time, and lasted the best part of a night in the woods, with a blanket from the press, a couple of potatoes I planned to bake in a fire, and a tin of beans that I couldn’t eat, having forgotten to bring a can-opener. Later, after we had moved to Corby, I got as far as Edinburgh, or London, or – on one bizarre occasion – Market Deeping, but it was the same map I was following, the same limbo world of orange street lamps and owl-haunted woods. If there is an afterlife, for me it will be limbo, the one truly great Catholic invention: a no man’s land of mystery and haunting music, with nobody good or holy around to be compared to – they will all be in heaven – just the interesting outsiders, the unbaptised and the pagan, and the faultless sceptics God cannot quite find it in Himself to send to hell.

  When I look back at my time in the prefabs, I am touched by the life I led. My sister and I were haunted: Margaret, eighteen months younger than me, had ghostly visions of men in long white robes standing over her in the dark, or she would be on her way home from Brownies, and she would suddenly realise she was being followed by some spirit, some not-human presence. I would spend hours in the woods, or out by the Water Houses, looking for angels. I had seen an angel once, standing in a tree, staring down at me, and I’d been dizzy and confused for a long time afterwards, touched by something unbearable, yet also by a kind of magic. Even at home, I was never safe from such visions. There were times when I was sitting up at night (though, once or twice it happened in the clear afternoon), when the door of the press would open slowly and something appeared: not spirit, not flesh, but something between the two, like the faded stain of blood and salt on the sleeve of a fishmonger’s coat, a creature that seemed less other than it ought to have done, a presence that I could barely distinguish from myself. I knew this was something I had to conceal from my parents, though I had no idea what it was: perhaps a fetch that possessed me, like the malevolent beings in old folk tales; perhaps nothing more than a memory and a competence beyond what I was deemed to possess by those around me, something angelic that had chosen a shape I couldn’t quite believe in, coming out of a wall or a door and filling my room with brightness and a delicious fear. Delicious because it was fanciful, something I knew I was making up, or at least collaborating with – unlike the fear my father inspired, a real terror over which I had no control. It’s hard to say what was most frightening: his body, which seemed so powerful and, at times, so dangerous; his moods, which see-sawed back and forth, jokey one minute, black and frightening the next; his voice. He had an amazing voice: most of the time he was silent, or soft-spoken, as if he was thinking about something else while he talked; then, out of the blue, it would harden and go dark, not necessarily a shout, but always a threat, always the harbinger of damage and terror. But the worst aspect of his voice was when he nagged at me, quietly and persistently eating away at my confidence, questioning my right even to occupy space in his world.

  ‘Stand up straight. Look at you. What is it? What’s wrong with you? Are you a hunchback or something? Come on. Stand up. Straighten your shoulders. Straighten your back. Look at yourself.’

  On and on. I would be walking along the street and he would be there, behind me, picking away. ‘You walk like a girl. Look at you. Why can’t you stand up straight?’ He would ignore the people going by, focused entirely on me, watching my every move, ready to pounce. When I started to read, he would criticise the books I was reading. When I brought home a report card, he would take it silently, cast his eye over it then pick out the lowest grade.

  ‘What happened here?’ he would say pointing at the offending B. ‘Geography. What’s wrong, you can’t remember the capital of Bolivia?’

  The next time I brought home a report card, I had an A in Geography. He studied the grades, took in the comments, sat quiet for a moment, considering before he spoke. ‘I see you’re falling behind in science,’ he said pointing to the A–. ‘What’s the minus for?’ He looked at me, knowing I wouldn’t dare to answer back. ‘It’s no good getting it right once, you know. You have to keep it up. Just because you did all right last time, it doesn’t mean you can just sit back and take it for granted. You have to keep at it.’ He set the card aside. ‘I didn’t get all the opportunities you’re getting,’ he said. ‘I’m working hard to give you a chance to do something with yourself. But it’s up to you. I can’t do it for you. All right?’ I nodded. He nodded
in turn. ‘All right, then,’ he said, then went back to his paper.

  At one level, I knew this was all happening for a reason – in his mind, at least. For my father, and for whole generations of working-class men, cruelty was an ideology. It was important, for the boy’s sake, to bring a son up tough: men had to be hard to get through life, there was no room for weakness or sentiment. It wasn’t what he would have chosen, but he didn’t want me to get hurt by looking for something I couldn’t have. What he wanted was to warn me against hope, against any expectation of someone from my background being treated as a human being in the big hard world. He wanted to kill off my finer – and so, weaker – self. Art. Music. Books. Imagination. Signs of weakness, all. A man was defined, in my father’s circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself. That my father was also a heavy drinker wasn’t a contradiction in this ideology: he drank hard, not for pleasure; he could hold his drink; alcohol, in its own way, was a drug of ascesis, as well as release. The hangovers were pure murder, but he still got up and went to work. He’d never missed a day’s work in his life through drink, he would say, and he never would. He didn’t seem to notice that, as soon as he was out of the company of his cronies from the Woodside or, later, the Hazel Tree, all that self-control withered away, and he became a monster – like the night he came home late from the Woodside and, while I lay sleeping in the next room, burned my favourite toy, a teddy bear called Sooty. It seems he’d come in and found it, strewn across the floor, as he put it, and he’d tossed it into the fire to teach me a lesson. If I couldn’t keep my things tidy, then I had to be prepared to lose them. The next morning, when I got up and went through to the living room, Sooty was gone. When I asked my mother if she’d seen him, she looked guilty, then she told me she hadn’t. I should go and look, he would turn up, I needed to take better care of my things. She never mentioned that she’d found what remained of Sooty smouldering away in the grate at five o’clock that morning. It was my father who told me what he’d done. ‘I put Sooty on the fire,’ he said. ‘You’re too big for a teddy now, anyway.’ I was six.