A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  Most importantly, Walter Pidgeon made decisions and stood by them, no matter what. Maybe this was what made him appear so competent. Whenever I saw a Walter Pidgeon film, I wanted to be a better person in a simple, unexceptional way: more thoughtful, more alert, less self-regarding, humbler, yet more self-assured than before. What I saw was a possibility of goodness, something more than ordinary decency. I clung to this possibility, knowing it for the fantasy it was, but needing something to aspire to. I would be walking through a garden, for example, and I would see a tree that had been so very carefully planted that it moved me. Somebody selected that tree, out of all the possible trees he could have chosen, and I would feel that this was a Walter Pidgeon decision, because the tree was exactly right for that spot: elegant, slender, not too dominant, it filled the space in a way that no other tree could have done. This sense of things being done right, this sense of the just act, is something a man should get from his father, just as the impression of gentility mixed with a certain wildness of spirit my mother experienced every time she saw a Franchot Tone movie should have come from her husband. No wonder my father felt lonely after the television arrived. He’d bought it on the cheap, I imagine, in some no-questions-asked deal, just to watch the racing and Scotsport, never realising that he was opening a box of dreams for the whole family, dreams that would forever cloud his house with alien possibilities.

  CHAPTER 6

  Around about my ninth birthday, my father began to fall apart. Something bad had happened at work, and I think he was finding it harder to get taken on for the better jobs. I didn’t know why at the time, but I knew something was wrong, because my parents were arguing more often, not just when my father went on a binge, but even when he was having a sober spell. Much of the problem had to do with money, of course, but it wasn’t just about that. There was my father’s behaviour at the occasional family gathering, for example, when he would embarrass everyone by drinking too much, then sitting around being maudlin, or making big claims about his past, about how he had almost become a professional footballer, or how a woman he’d known in Germany had tried to drown herself when he told her he was leaving for good, to go back to Scotland. Yet what bothered me most, as I remember, was his claim, after a few drinks, that he looked like Robert Mitchum. According to everybody else, he looked nothing like Robert Mitchum, but it wasn’t a serious matter. His drinking, his occasional falls, his disappearing act, when he would walk out of a gathering and not be seen again for hours, were what worried my mother’s family and our neighbours. The Robert Mitchum delusion was, by comparison, a laughing matter.

  ‘What are you talking about, man,’ my Uncle John would say.

  ‘It’s true,’ my half-drunk father would protest. Nobody knew where the notion came from: perhaps, during some drunken night at the Woodside, one of his cronies had seen the ghost of something pass across his features and pointed out a resemblance that, the very next moment, would seem ill-founded even to that drunken assembly.

  ‘Who telt ye that? A blind man?’

  My father would sneak a sly look at my mother, then he would say, ‘Well, it was a woman, is the truth of it. With perfectly good eyes and all.’

  My uncle would snort derisively. ‘What woman was that, then?’

  My father would clam up at this point, or he’d revert to his obsession with Norman Wisdom, the slapstick comedian who composed his favourite song, ‘Don’t Laugh at Me, (’Cause I’m a Fool)’. My father would sing this song at family gatherings, or to passing strangers on his way home from the pub. Norman Wisdom was his hero: as a nine-year-old, Wisdom had been abandoned by his mother; at eleven, he was a runaway, working as a miner, a cabin boy and in various odd jobs, before joining up. In 1946, he entered show business: he was thirty-one, but he quickly became a star as the unfortunate, Chaplinesque Norman Pitkin, a clumsy, sentimental loser in a cockily skewed tweed cap and a crumpled suit and tie that appeared to have a life of its own, especially when a pretty girl was close by. My father loved Wisdom, for reasons I couldn’t fathom at the time; looking back, however, it’s obvious that Pitkin was some kind of alter ego for him: an abandoned child who seemed unlovable, and had to struggle against the odds, Pitkin would overcome the contempt of the boss, the spite of others, the girl’s indifference, and end up winning through by sheer energy and puppyish charm. All the time, he believed in himself, and in the basic goodness of the world around him.

  The Pitkin persona was my father’s harmless side – a bit of a fool, a bit of a liar – but it embarrassed me, and it embarrassed my mother even more. Still, it was nothing to what was to come, if he had his way: once the women had been packed off home, the men would adjourn to the pub, or to a hotel, and my father would start, picking on strangers, arguing with the barman, making a spectacle of himself. There were ugly moments with other uncles and older cousins who tried to quiet him down and, once, a scary escapade when my Uncle John, who had been led to believe that my father could drive, allowed him to take over the wheel of his new car. They had both been to the pub and, though my uncle was probably under the limit, he let himself be convinced that my father had learned specialist driving skills in the RAF. The truth was, my father couldn’t drive at all – as my uncle quickly discovered – but he had seemed confident when he got behind the wheel, confident enough to set off at a lick, racing off down a country road, and not coming to a halt till John grabbed the wheel from his control and forced the car on to the verge. When the story came out, everybody’s worst fears about my father were confirmed. The only person who saw the funny side of it all, in retrospect, was Uncle John, a man not easily shaken. He had been in the Black Watch all the way through the war, and he had seen things there that he never talked about, though the presumption was that they were more than a match for a short joyride with my drunken father. The other remarkable thing about John was his seemingly infinite capacity to forgive other men their follies. He was the only member of our extended family who could tolerate my father, in the end. His kindness was hard to spot, behind a gruff, sarcastic exterior, but once you saw through his brilliant disguise, there was no denying it.

  When my father came home from one of these adventures that had involved members of her family, my mother would be disgusted with him. Usually she said little, occasionally she would cry. That upset the whole house, but the real upset came when, one night, after we’d been to a wedding, my mother turned round, as we were coming through the door, and said, clearly, so everyone could hear, ‘I should have married George Grant.’

  My father froze. For a moment, I thought he would hit her. Then he pursed his lips grimly, his worst thoughts confirmed. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘So you should.’

  An explanation of the mysterious George Grant was eventually forthcoming. Or rather, two explanations. My mother’s version was as straightforward as possible: before she married my father, she had known – or worked with – a man named George Grant, but they had never been anything more than friends. Not even that, really, just two people who would exchange pleasantries in passing, people both friendly and insignificant enough to one another to be a sight for sore eyes on a hard day. My father, however, told a different story. According to this version, George Grant and my mother had been cosy, going out to the pictures from time to time, even planning to get engaged. For a while, it had been a big romance, and the whole family had wanted their Tessie to marry this good, kindly man. Then, along he came and stole her away, displacing George Grant in her affections for ever. Once the cat was out of the bag, my father enjoyed talking about all this, his one victory in life. He knew he was better than his rival, because he had won – had he not? – even if my mother claimed, as she had done that night, and as she was to do from time to time in the coming years, that she wished he hadn’t. For a while, the house was full of George Grant, a ghostly presence, a bargaining chip, a scapegoat, a joke. Then, one day, it occurred to me that he wasn’t as much of a joke as my parents pretended. After all, my mother called my father �
��George’ (the confirmation name he’d taken when he converted to Catholicism), even though his real name – the name I believed his family had given him – was Thomas. I remember realising this around the time of my own confirmation. I had chosen the name George, pretty much without thinking (no; there was a stupid reason behind it: I had been baptised John Paul, and I added the name George because of the Beatles). Then I saw it. We were both, my father and I, haunted by my mother’s first love.

  For months afterwards I thought about George Grant. My mother had made light of it all, but she had also been embarrassed, which meant there was something to the story, no matter what she said. Soon, I had convinced myself that she had been in love with George Grant, but some terrible accident of impulse or circumstance had perverted her from her true path, and made her marry my father instead. I spent hours wondering what would have happened if she had married the man she’d really wanted: what I would have been like, had I been their son; whether I would have existed in any identifiable form at all; whether I would have been happier as the different boy I might have been, with somebody else’s blood, in somebody else’s house, following somebody else’s example. For the first time in my life, my mother seemed mysterious to me: a woman with a secret, dignified, even noble, in the sacrifice she had made, and I watched her, furtively, for any sign of regret, or longing. My father, meanwhile, became even more of a shadow on our lives. On the few occasions we saw him during the week, and on the interminable weekends, whether he was in the house, or out somewhere and just about to return at any moment, drunk and vindictive, I could see, all too plainly, that he was an impostor, a phantom, a bulky, uncontainable thing that nobody wanted.

  In the daytime, I dreamed of what might have been. It was a makeshift and tender fantasy: my father went away – I was very careful never to let him die, even for a moment, in these daydreams – and he was replaced by George Grant, who regained my mother’s affections as easily as a bird returns, at dusk, to a favourite perch. In the evenings, after school, I sometimes sat up late, or lay awake in bed, listening, at the time my father usually got back from Grangemouth, or wherever he was working, and if he was even a minute or two late, I imagined that he wasn’t coming back, that he had gone off into the moonlight on some country road between work and home, walking away on some wide road or vanishing down some alley of bricks and nettles, going back to the darkness from which he had come, when he first displaced George Grant in the life my mother should have had. At the time, I knew this was the best thing for everybody, even for him. He would be happier gone, he could even imagine himself missed, a treasured memory, loved more for being absent, but free to live however he chose.

  Everything stayed hidden. My father’s late-night parties, his occasional drunken rampages around the house, my child’s fantasies of death and redemption, my mother’s attempts to hold things together, it was all secret – known by anybody who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured on those Saturdays when Dunfermline lost at home. Nobody talked about what was going on, as long as it went on behind closed doors. Then, all of a sudden, late in the summer of my ninth year, everybody was talking at once, and the person they were talking about was our neighbour, the gentle giant, Arthur Fulton.

  CHAPTER 7

  Nobody thought Arthur was guilty. Someone had made a mistake. People from Blackburn Drive, people in the town generally, would gather in shop doorways and talk quietly about what had or had not happened that day. They all agreed Arthur Fulton wasn’t capable of murdering, or attempting to murder, anybody, let alone some slip of a girl just out of her teens, a girl he could have picked up with one hand and crushed the life from the way other men crush beer cans. They said it again and again, in stage whispers, pretending they didn’t want the children to hear, relishing the fine physical details: he could have snapped her neck like a twig, he could have squeezed the life out of her in seconds, he could have . . . All the time, they talked about the girl as if she was already dead, as if Arthur – or not Arthur, but whoever had committed this terrible act – had actually succeeded. Some went so far as to suggest that there was something between them, this girl and Arthur, that she wasn’t some girl he’d met on the road, but someone he cared about, someone he had loved. Otherwise, they reasoned, why would she still be alive? Why would Arthur have left her, unconscious, but still breathing, by the side of the public highway?

  Listening in on these conversations, I began to understand. Everybody thought Arthur was guilty; there had been no mistake. He was their gentle giant, but nobody thought he was very smart – and that was his failing. A smarter man would have finished the girl off and thrown her into Loch Fitty, where nobody would find her; maybe he would have burned the body, or fixed the scene to look like a bungled robbery. Now, they were angry with Arthur, not for what he had done, but because he hadn’t done it properly. If he really had taken that girl out on to a country road that day to kill her, he should have done what he had set out to do, and left her to rot. Most of all, he shouldn’t have allowed himself to be caught because, by making such a mess of it all, he was forcing them to recognise that they had known nothing about him, and nothing about themselves, all along. He was one of their own, and he had betrayed them. It was a quiet, resentful anger they felt, like the anger people felt towards Mary Bell, when she killed those little boys about a year later, the same anger they felt towards Myra Hindley. Arthur had broken the cardinal rule of small-town life: he had failed to be what he seemed. Nobody had believed him dangerous for all those years, because he seemed so slow-witted, too shy and clumsy to be a killer. They thought criminals were clever, or at least cunning, like the bad men they saw at the pictures, smart-talking, ruthless, accomplished creatures with leather gloves and lengths of knotted cord.

  Oddly enough, it was my father who made me see all this. He’d always welcomed Arthur into our house at Hogmanay, and on the odd occasion when sociability was unavoidable; now, when everyone else was swearing on a stack of Bibles and mothers’ lives that they’d had no idea, he came out on the side of common sense. ‘Arthur’s big, but he’s a baby, really,’ he said. ‘First sign of trouble, and these big men panic. Remember when they wanted people for the foot-and-mouth? They wouldn’t take Arthur – ’

  My mother was annoyed. She knew my father would have no scruples about repeating such things in public. ‘He couldn’t have gone anyway,’ she said. ‘He was driving the long-distance lorries then – ’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ my father said. ‘These big, stupid men are like children. You can’t really trust them – ’

  ‘You sound like you think he did do it,’ my mother interrupted. ‘I don’t want to hear talk like that when Mary’s around – ’

  ‘What if he did?’ my father said. ‘Do you think they would have arrested him so fast if he was innocent?’

  My mother was horrified. ‘How can you say that?’ she said. ‘I thought you liked Arthur – ’

  ‘I do,’ my father said. ‘That’s why I’m standing up for him.’

  ‘You’ve got a funny way of standing up for people – ’

  ‘What I’m saying is,’ my father went on, with exaggerated patience, ‘is that he probably did do it. But he shouldn’t get the jail for it.’

  ‘Even if he’s guilty?’

  ‘Even if he’s guilty. I mean, it was probably an accident. It’s not as if he’ll be doing anything like that again.’

  ‘And what about that poor girl?’ my mother asked. ‘What happens to her?’

  ‘I thought you said he couldn’t have done it,’ my father said. He had adopted that tone of voice he would get, when he had you in a corner. Master of the invalid, but pressing argument.

  ‘I don’t,’ my mother replied. ‘But I still think the girl should get some kind of justice – ’

  My father laughed bitterly. ‘It won’t do her any good if Arthur Fulton goes to jail,’ he said. ‘It’s
happened. It’s over. Time to get on with her life.’

  My mother considered this for a moment and was about to reply – or so it seemed. Then, just like that, she gave up. Maybe she thought my father was just joking, just trying to get a rise out of her. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he did what they said. That would be . . . ’

  As she searched for the right word, my father smiled grimly. ‘These things happen,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose Arthur planned to do it. If he had, he’d surely have done a better job.’ He shook his head sadly; it seemed that what bothered him most about the incident wasn’t the possibility that Arthur had tried to kill the girl, but the idea that he’d botched it so badly. ‘It was probably just an accident, one way or another.’

  My mother didn’t answer. There was no point, after all. To her, everything happened, or ought to have happened, for a reason. You made a choice, and if you chose the wrong path, it was a sin and you had to pay the penance – and it struck me, then, how odd it was that these two people should be married to one another. It wasn’t just that they were different in temperament, or in what they wanted from life, or in what they believed – it was that they inhabited different worlds. For my mother, life was full of patterns and logic; my father, on the other hand, was haunted by the irrational. Maybe that was what made him so decisive: there was a sense in which no action had any meaningful consequences for him, a sense that there was really no such thing as cause and effect. When he said that Arthur’s pathetic attempt to kill the girl was an accident, he was saying something about life itself. What he meant was that it was all an accident: the meeting, whatever history Arthur had with the girl, whatever feelings he or she might have had, the mood Arthur was in that afternoon, the fact that he panicked. Everything that happened was an accident. The only power you had was to act decisively when the accident happened and so make your own mark on the proceedings. And the truth was that, in Arthur Fulton’s place, my father wouldn’t have flunked the job. He would have broken the girl’s neck and left her in a ditch somewhere, then he would have gone to the pub and sat all night playing crib with his friends. I think he was disappointed that Arthur Fulton couldn’t have acted the same way. The one thing Arthur had done wrong was to get himself caught. Had he been in Arthur’s place, my father wouldn’t have made the same mistake.