A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  My mother didn’t know what to say, other than to apologise. She was standing at the door, in her apron, the smell of boiled turnips filling the room.

  ‘I hope she doesn’t plan to eat thae neeps,’ the farmer said. ‘They’re meant for fodder.’ He looked past my mother to where we were sitting at the table. Margaret shrank into her seat. ‘For the beasts,’ he continued, being helpful.

  ‘Oh, no,’ my mother said. ‘It’s – something for school. An experiment. I’m sure she didn’t know – ’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ the farmer put in quickly, sensing, now, what he had stumbled into. Maybe he knew all along, and had come to see if he could help. ‘Just – well, if she comes and asks me, next time.’

  My mother promised she would, and the man went away. I thought she would be angry and send Margaret to the bedroom for what she had done, but she wasn’t angry, and she didn’t say anything. She just walked back to the cooker and turned down the gas. Then she stood, stirring the soup, gazing out of the window. She was doing her best to seem calm, but I could tell she was crying.

  Secretly, my father still had more than the odd flutter on the horses. I think my first real prefabs era memory is of running lines for him: think, rather than know, because there are other, earlier scenes in my head, incidents on a beach, or on our Sunday walks in the local cemetery, that have been described often enough, during family conversations, in the endless whiling away of time, to be imprinted in my mind, almost real, almost mine. Yet, in spite of that, if I were asked for a first memory, it would be of learning a series of words and numbers, taking possession of a fistful of banknotes, and running a mile or so to a shop on the edge of the next town, where a man who seemed to me extraordinarily old would take the money, listen to what I had to say, and send me away with a bag of sherbet lemons or a bottle of Cherryade. I’m not sure when all this happened: I was five, maybe six, and one day, when my father let me choose a horse from the list in the paper, I took Nicholas Silver, a big, strong grey who won the Grand National in 1960, at fifty to one. I got to bet a shilling – though at the time I would rather have had the money, or the sweets it would buy – and I liked it when I was presented with my winnings, an impossible sum that seems to grow magically out of mere guesswork.

  How a grown-up comes to forget the terrors of childhood is a mystery to me, but he does. No one who remembered what it was like to thread his way through the backstreets haunted by the strange and violent dogs of my childhood would ever keep a Rottweiler or a bull terrier. But then, dogs were part of the pathology of all the places where I grew up. Big dogs, in particular. It’s mostly about power, I suppose: a big dog makes a small man bigger; imagine what it does for a frightened child. At first I wanted a black Labrador, then I longed for a husky; then I didn’t want a dog at all. I’d met a stray one day, when I was around seven, and it had followed me home, a black-and-white mongrel with a curious, intelligent face that no boy could resist. When I asked if I could keep it, my mother assumed that soft, quiet tone she reserved for non-negotiable situations. ‘You’re not having a dog,’ she said. ‘And that’s that.’

  ‘It doesn’t belong to anybody,’ I said. ‘It’s a stray.’

  ‘I don’t care what it is. You’re not bringing a dog into this house.’

  We’d had this discussion before and I knew it was no use, so I decided to wait and see what my father said, when he got home from work. My father liked dogs; he was always talking about the Alsatian he’d supposedly worked with in Germany, a big, brutally intelligent beast called Prince. I didn’t believe him, even then: I’d seen police-dog handlers at Gala Days, and I knew it took a specialist to manage a dog like that. My father had been a flight sergeant. He wasn’t a dog specialist. He did like dogs, though, and I had hopes he might talk my mother round. I had no idea, of course, what I was letting us all in for. That night, with my stray friend gone, I asked him if I could get a dog.

  ‘Ask your mum,’ he said.

  ‘I asked her. She said to ask you.’

  He looked at me from behind a paper he’d brought home from Grangemouth. ‘No she didn’t,’ he said.

  I thought it best not to pursue this line. ‘But can I?’ I said. ‘I’ll look after it.’

  My mother appeared at the kitchen door. ‘You’re not having a dog,’ she said, ‘and that’s final.’ I’d thought she was out of earshot.

  My father didn’t say anything. His paper went up, while he waited for his dinner to be on the table. He probably hadn’t even heard what I’d said. Ask your mother was his standard reply when he didn’t want to be bothered with me. I’d timed things wrong, I realised. He’d just come in from work, he was tired and, worse, he was sober. I’d made a mistake: there would be no dog.

  But I was wrong. Or almost wrong. The following Saturday, my father appeared in the middle of the afternoon with the saddest excuse for a canine I had ever seen. It was the kind of dog that gets called Patch in movies and cartoons, a cross-bred, cross-eyed, unlovable runt of a thing that someone had given him at the Woodside, probably for the price of a pint. By the time he got it back to the house, it was missing something, or someone, whining miserably and pulling at the end of its ragged string leash, dirty, wild-eyed and as horribly unhappy with its new surroundings as my mother was with it.

  ‘What have you done?’ was all she could say, when she finally spoke.

  ‘It’s a wee dog,’ my father replied. ‘For the boy. He’s always talking about getting a dog.’

  I felt sick. This dog was so unappealing, even I didn’t want it. I wanted the stray I had made friends with, and given a secret name. I would sooner have kept a cobra than this desperate thing, but I couldn’t say so. My father would have been too upset. Now, he turned to me. ‘Here,’ he said, waving at the worried animal that was now abjectly plastered to the floor by the stove, aware of nothing but my mother’s terrible gaze. ‘I got you a dog. What do you want to call him?’

  I didn’t know what to say. All of a sudden, I knew I would never want a dog again for as long as I lived, that I had probably never really wanted one in the first place. I stared at the wretched beast, and I did feel sorry for it, but I felt sorrier for myself, and even sorrier still for my parents – at that moment, both my parents – so helplessly locked into the misery of wedlock. All I could do was stall. ‘Where did he come from?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a good wee puppy,’ my father said. He obviously didn’t want to say anything more about provenance in front of my mother. ‘All it needs is a good home – ’

  ‘It’s not staying,’ my mother said. ‘For one thing, we can’t afford – ’ My father stiffened. If there was one thing he didn’t want to hear, ever, it was the details of what he couldn’t afford. Realising her mistake, my mother turned back to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You can have something else. But not a dog.’

  I nodded. I wanted to be invisible. I looked at my father and saw the misery in his eyes. He’d been defeated again, this time by his own son. As tears came to my eyes, I turned quickly and ran from the room.

  I never quite understood the balance of power in my parents’ house. Usually, my father did what he liked and damn the consequences. Right after a binge, he would be remorseful, especially if he, or one of his cronies, had done any damage, and the month or so following one of my mother’s occasional mysterious illnesses would always be a softly-softly period, but, mostly, he did what he wanted. Looking back now, I can see the underlying blackmailer’s logic in this scene: my father does what he thinks, or can pretend to think, is a good deed, knowing all the time that his seeming kindness will be refused. My mother will feel guilty about the apparent rejection, even while she sees through it all, and also feels thoroughly manipulated. It’s one of the facts of marriage: you don’t get credit points for anything you can’t explain in simple, everyday terms. My mother knew, at some level, what was going on, but she had no way of putting it into words; or if she did, my father would pretend he didn’t understand. The mo
ment would pass, but there would be a marker set against it, and later, when the opportunity arose, it would be used as an excuse to do something quite unconnected with that particular event, or it would be cast up to the other party in an argument, and the game would be complete. Sure enough, the following Friday, my father didn’t turn up until close to midnight. He came straight into my room and woke me. ‘Come into the kitchen,’ he said. ‘Alec’s brought you a present.’

  I knew who Alec was. He was the crony my mother most disliked, a sly, smiling man with very round eyes in a flat, pale face. He worked on the building with my father; he was also involved in other activities, though I didn’t know what they were. All I knew was that my mother disapproved. Once, she used the word criminal, which was a big word in her vocabulary, but I never found out what she meant by it.

  Alec was sober. He was standing in the kitchen, holding a big hessian sack of the kind people used for grain or animal feed. I’d seen them being delivered to the farms round about, and I loved how rounded they looked, the grain slipping around inside as the men unloaded them from the great lorries, the fat sides daubed with numbers and place names. This sack, though, was long and limp, hanging from Alec’s hand, where the top was all rucked and bunched up in his fist, and it was empty, except for something at the very bottom, some live thing that was moving around restlessly, not so much afraid as curious, wanting to get out, but not necessarily to run away. Alec grinned. ‘Come and see,’ he said to me, jiggling the sack. ‘What do you think this is?’ He was trying too hard, as always. I’d noticed that before. He could be nice as you like, he could turn it on like a tap, but he always wanted to get something for himself out of any encounter. There were times when I felt sorry for him a little, thinking that even a boy my age could see right through him. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe he was lonely.

  I knew it was an animal. Obviously. After the argument about the dog, I also knew it had to be a pet of some kind – but it seemed too small in its hessian sack to be a dog. Maybe a kitten. I supposed it could be a small puppy, but I didn’t think my father would do that again. He rarely made the same mistake twice; not when there were so many others to make. Probably it was a kitten. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. My father was standing beside me, watching. He wasn’t altogether drunk, but he was on the way. I felt a sudden exquisite shudder of dread. Something was about to go wrong.

  Alec unclenched his fist and let the sack drop to the floor. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, slowly, their tiny black noses emerging first, two hedgehogs appeared: baby hedgehogs, I thought, tiny, far thinner and quicker than I would have imagined. I don’t know what Alec and my father thought they would do, maybe curl up into a ball, or wait to be offered a saucerful of milk, but the hedgehogs had no time for that. As soon as they hit the linoleum, they took off: in spite of the light, and the huge presence standing over them, they scampered away, heading for the living-room door, and pattering on, into the hallway, into my parents’ bedroom. Usually, when my father was out late, my mother would close the door, so she wouldn’t be disturbed by his friends’ antics; this time, perhaps because she had gone to bed early, and she wanted to listen out in case Margaret or I needed her, the door was wide open. In ran the hedgehogs, and in we all ran, chasing them: me, my father, even Alec, excited by the sound of those tiny claws on the floor, or by the speed, or perhaps by the apparent single-mindedness of the two hedgehogs, who had, without a moment’s hesitation, made off at full tilt towards the bedroom. It was an eerie sound, that clatter of little nails on the floor.

  I think my mother had been half asleep, but by the time we got to the bedroom, she was wide awake. She had been lying, not in, but on the bed, in her nightdress and housecoat, which was the moment’s only saving feature. Still, nobody had ever seen her like that, much less one of my father’s cronies. ‘What in God’s name is going on?’ she cried, as we all tumbled into the little bedroom. She was staring at us, and I suddenly felt betrayed, implicated in a crime that wasn’t my fault, a crime that had been perpetrated against me as much as anyone.

  ‘Sorry, missus,’ Alec said, not smiling for once, as he withdrew.

  My mother barely noticed him. She was staring at my father. ‘Well?’

  He didn’t answer. Something was under the bed; there was the sound of a scuffle, then both hedgehogs darted out and away, back towards the door. My mother watched them go.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, wanting to keep the peace. ‘It’s just hedgehogs. They’re not – ’

  ‘Hedgehogs!’ My mother was on the verge of panic. She almost jumped off the bed; then she remembered her bare feet.

  ‘Never mind,’ my father said. ‘It was a bad idea.’ He sounded aggrieved, as if he’d done something, not only utterly blameless, but entirely logical, entirely benevolent, and was being unfairly punished for it. ‘As usual,’ he added, and I knew from the tone of his voice that we’d all pay for this night’s business, one way or another. He looked at me, as if he expected some kind of useful intervention, then he shook his head sadly and retreated. After a moment I could hear him talking to Alec in the kitchen; then the back door banged shut and they were gone.

  My mother looked at me. ‘Go to bed,’ she said.

  I never did understand how it worked, that balance of power. There were times when my mother was completely in charge, the one sensible grown-up in a house full of children. Then, all of a sudden, for no obvious reason, things switched around. My mother was like a frightened child, trying to cope with a man who was, or could at any moment be, out of control. I didn’t understand it, but I knew it well enough. So it was no surprise, a few nights later, when she came into my room and woke me. ‘Get dressed,’ she said. ‘Quick.’

  I got out of bed and picked up my clothes. I could hear voices – men talking, not shouting, but talking loudly, excited, just starting to slip out of control – and I knew someone was there, but that was nothing new. What was new was the expression on my mother’s face: a look of deep apprehension, it seemed at first, and then, as she stood watching me, waiting at the door while I pulled on my raggedy sweater and jeans, a look of fear.

  ‘Quick,’ she said again. I glanced over at the other bed, where my sister was sleeping. ‘Never mind Margaret. He’ll not bother her.’

  I wasn’t sure what this meant, but now I was afraid. Afraid for myself, and afraid for my mother. Afraid of what might happen. I slipped my plimsolls on over my bare feet and laced them up.

  ‘Just go outside for a bit,’ my mother said. ‘Till things settle down.’

  I started towards the door, where she was still standing, as if ready to bar it. She made me think of Catherine Douglas, who tried to save James I from his assassins by barring the door with her thin, bare arm. We’d had that story in school and I hadn’t been able to put out of my mind the thought of that delicate, white arm cracking as the door was forced in.

  My mother shook her head. ‘Go out the window,’ she said. ‘You’ve done it often enough.’ I was surprised: I didn’t think she knew about my night sorties; then I realised that she was trying to make a little joke out of it all, as if what was happening was just some kind of game. ‘Quick now,’ she said. ‘Just go out and round the back – ’ She broke off to listen. Someone was coming, it seemed. I hopped up on to my bed and opened the window. The cool night air gusted in as the window swung open. I had been out at night often enough; it didn’t frighten me in the least. Not the dark, not the woods. There was more to be afraid of indoors. I had learned a fondness for the cool darkness, the calls of the tawny owls in Mr Kirk’s strip of woods, the sky full of stars that, when I was older, I would be able to name. I climbed up on to the window sill, then I turned back to her. I wanted to say something, to make some arrangement about what I would do and when I should come back, but I didn’t know what to say. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘And don’t go far. Stay near the house. All right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ sh
e said, more for her own sake than mine.

  I nodded again, then I dropped down into the cool darkness. It was quiet outside, and I was stunned, for a moment, by how still it was, how nearly silent. Then an owl called, and I scampered away from the window. I felt like an animal, like one of the wolverines I had read about in Look and Learn, or in one of the Jack London novels Miss Conway had lent me. A wolverine, a coyote, a quick, lithe thing, slipping away in the night. I passed through the narrow gap in our front hedge, and I could smell the cold, the green of it, that privet and dust smell of a coal town in summer. Back in the house, I heard my father shouting, then more voices, arguing about something, coming to some agreement, and settling down, only to flare up again as the front door tilted open and my father stood there, in a shirt that, for that one moment, seemed impossibly, cinematically white. He looked out into the darkness a moment and I think he was on the point of coming out, then he turned aside and slammed the door shut. I waited, watched. I was still worried, though not for myself. Then, all of a sudden, as a wave of cold and utter detachment came over me, I realised that nothing more would happen – not that night, and not the next day. My father and his friends would sit drinking till the drink was gone, then the other men would leave, and my father would go to bed. The one thing he prided himself on was that he never hit my mother – and at that moment, I not only believed that this was true, but that he never would hit her. He had no need. That night, for the first time, I saw that. She was terrified of him, but she had given up being frightened for herself. Now it was her children she had to protect. It still hadn’t registered that I was out there because, for the first time, she thought I was in physical danger. I thought she just didn’t want me to see something that would shame me, or her, or my father. Tomorrow, I thought, things would go back to normal. It would be quite a time before I saw that, no matter what my mother or any of us did, there had never been a normal to go back to.