A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  I dread to think what would have ensued if my father had opened the door when Simon Corston arrived. The one habit of his I most liked was the way he’d stay in his chair when visitors came to the door. If somebody didn’t answer right away, he would come to the bottom of the stairs and call out, ‘Somebody’s at the door. Can you not hear it?’ Then, when my mother or I appeared, he would mutter, ‘What, are ye deef or something?’ as he shambled back through to the front room and his television programme. That night, it was no different – just good luck that I was emerging from my room when the knock came at the door. I hurried downstairs; my mother had one of her headaches, and I didn’t want her disturbed. I imagined it would be a neighbour wanting to borrow something, or looking for a babysitter, or it could have been one of Margaret’s friends, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be for me. My friends knew not to come to my house unannounced. Only by arrangement: that was the deal.

  It was Simon. As soon as I saw him, I knew why he was there. He was completely out of his mind. Stoned, was my first thought – and then I saw. ‘What the fuck?’

  He gave me an important, blissful look. ‘Acid,’ he said.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I had no idea why he’d chosen to come to my house. I hadn’t told him that I was doing acid. I hadn’t even seen him in weeks. I could hear my father fussing around next door, then the sound on the television went low. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  The door to the living room opened. ‘What’s going on?’ my father said. Then he saw Simon. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘I’m just going out for a bit,’ I said. It was too late to finesse things. I had to get Simon away before he said or did anything stupid. ‘Come on.’ I virtually pushed him out the front door; then I turned to my father. ‘I’ll not be long,’ I said, grabbing my jacket from the peg in the hall. I hope I didn’t sound as lame to him as I did to myself.

  ‘Aye, well, keep it down,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s no well.’ Then he disappeared back into the living room, and turned up the volume on the TV.

  Every acid head had a duty, in those days, to look after fellow-travellers who might be in need of counsel, companionship, cigarettes or vitamin C. Simon really needed them all, but he was only prepared to admit to wanting the smokes. I took him to my favourite place, an old, twisted oak about a hundred yards from the house, and we climbed up into the branches. I fished some Benson & Hedges, a packet of skins and a pitiful amount of grass out of my jacket. It was all I had. We sat in the tree for a while, talking, looking up at the stars. I can see now that he was a good sort, Simon. I remember, the first time I heard Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Happy Trails was round at his house. I hadn’t seen him for a while, mainly because my other friends – Richard, in particular – didn’t trust him. One warm Sunday afternoon during the holidays, when we’d been hanging around the streets, trying to figure out what to do, Simon had come along and hooked up with us – me, Richard, his brother Tom, a guy from the Lincoln Estate whose name I can’t remember. Richard didn’t like that, the way Simon just insinuated himself. We drifted around some more, then we got tired of drifting. ‘Is your dad in?’ Richard asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘he’s on backs.’

  ‘Well, we could go to yours, couldn’t we? Your mum will make us some tea. And we can wipe the mud off our boots.’

  ‘Tea,’ I said. ‘Good idea.’ I was trying to ignore his other remark, because Simon knew, everybody knew, what he meant – and the truth is, I felt sorry for him. Simon’s parents had money, and they didn’t think anybody was good enough for their son, but he was a generous guy, quiet, a little shy, fairly smart. I didn’t want him getting upset – which, of course, was exactly why I hadn’t seen him in so long, why he hadn’t turned up or dropped by. It was my pity, not Richard’s rudeness, that had driven him away. Now, I was glad to help out. Simon had to be back home soon, and he didn’t need his prissy, tight-arsed parents finding out what he’d been up to. Besides, if his parents found out he’d been taking LSD, they would probably blame it on me. They’d always said I was a bad influence. A year before, when I’d been expelled from school, it was Simon I was with on the fateful day, when I was caught drunk and smoking a joint on school premises. I was tossed out right away, Simon was given another chance. If he apologised to the teachers whose classes he’d skipped, he could stay on. His parents had gone down to the school and told the headmaster that their son was easily led, and that it was all my fault. My mother had gone to the school too, but she left it too late. I was expelled, Simon stayed on. In the end, though, we both ended up doing acid.

  When I got home, my father was waiting up for me. He was stone-cold sober, very calm, determined to be reasonable. He called me into the living room, and we sat there, the television eerily silent, while he set out his cards. ‘I know what’s going on,’ he said, gazing at me squarely.

  ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘That boy was on something,’ he said. ‘You could see it in his eyes – ’

  ‘He’d just had too much to drink – ’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, son,’ my father broke in. He was staying calm, which impressed me. I’d expected him to explode. ‘I’m not buttoned up at the back of the head, you know.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘So what was he on?’ I was wondering how far I could go with this.

  ‘Well, I suppose,’ my father said, ‘he was on the same thing you were on a couple of Sundays back . . . ’ He waited for my to deny it. I didn’t. ‘Dope,’ he added, darkly. I wondered if he’d been reading the literature they handed out at school for parents with children at risk.

  ‘Dope?’ I said. ‘What do you mean, dope?’

  He almost lost control, but caught himself in time. ‘Cannabis,’ he said. ‘It’s not new, you know. People took drugs in my day – ’

  I shook my head. ‘Well, you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t cannabis.’

  ‘What wasn’t?’

  ‘What Simon was on,’ I said. ‘Cannabis resin. Grass. Marijuana. Afghan black. Panama red. Reefer.’ I paused a moment to suggest that the list could go on indefinitely; that, if pressed, I could give him more names for Cannabis sativa than there were saints in heaven. ‘That’s what you mean, right?’

  He set his mouth. He was doing well. ‘So what was it, then?’ he asked, his voice quiet.

  ‘LSD.’ Why not? I thought. I was tired of pretences.

  ‘L S D ?’ He wasn’t just on the point of being angry any more. ‘That boy?’ He was close to letting it show that he was afraid. He studied my face. ‘Well, I hope you don’t take that stuff.’

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t care what he knew, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted my mother to find out.

  ‘Well?’ He was close to letting his front slide. Afraid, but angry too. Now, there were only three possible answers: Yes, No, and None of your business – but they would all have meant the same thing to him at that moment. He had already decided, and he was right – only he was also wrong, because he didn’t know anything about it, and anyway, who was he to preach to me about self-control? ‘Do you know how dangerous that stuff is?’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’

  That did it. He was angry now. I could see, in fact, that he wanted to hit me. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t hitting me already. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I wanted him to be hitting me. ‘You think you’re so clever,’ he said. ‘But you’re not.’ He shook his head, as if he pitied me. ‘And you’re not going anywhere till you give me a straight answer – ’

  I stood up. ‘What if I do?’ I said. ‘It’s no worse than drink.’

  He stayed in his seat. The anger had gone, bled away in a matter of seconds, to be replaced by real, almost tangible fear. He didn’t know what to make of this, he didn’t know what to say. Acid was beyond his remit. My father dwelt among men he knew, men he could read. Now, all at once, it was dawning on him that the world that I h
ad begun to inhabit – the world where people bought and sold ‘drugs’ – was a mysterious realm of endlessly shifting and dubious allegiances between wily, doe-eyed hippies who seemed harmless enough until they got you hooked, and innocent, fresh-faced sixth-formers who thought they were signing up for a bit of harmless fun. And he really was afraid. He didn’t know what to do with me. He had never known what to do, he knew that, but this was a problem he needed to go away, and he’d worked out for himself that hitting me wasn’t the way to achieve that goal. At that moment, I felt a sudden access of power, of freedom, and, at the same time, I was almost overwhelmed by a sensation of helpless pity. I didn’t know what to do with him, either. I wanted to tell him that he’d got it all wrong, that I had no intention of becoming one of those scrawny hard-bitten junkies that he saw, or imagined he saw, about the town, zombies and nutters who took to heroin and all those other terrifying drugs he had read about with all the force of the Calvinism in which their souls were steeped. ‘It’s not what you think,’ I said. ‘It’s not addictive.’ I wasn’t sure if I sounded smug or naive. A little of both, I suppose.

  He stared at me and in his face I read something I couldn’t name: disbelief? hopelessness? disgust? a father’s ordinary worry? Then he shook his head and stood up. ‘I’m not telling your mother about this,’ he said. ‘Because I know what it would do to her.’ He looked crumpled, weak. ‘I don’t know what more to say to you,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s up to you now.’ He studied my face for a moment, then he turned and went out of the room. I heard him climbing the stairs: a tired man with a five o’clock start the next morning. Now that I am older than he was then, it seems amazing to think that he was just forty-five years old. In retrospect, he seems so worn, so fatigued. At the time, though, what I realised, after he had gone, was that, for the first time in years, we’d had a conversation, an actual conversation in the night, when he had been sober. He had been sober, he had tried to get through to me, and I had felt a real, if momentary, desire to explain myself. That last remark, however, said it all: it’s up to you. It was what he said whenever he gave up and washed his hands of a problem. That night, he was washing his hands of me and, as the door closed behind him, I hated him for it.

  CHAPTER 8

  Sheffield, the summer of ’72. I wake in an unfamiliar churchyard, lying in the corner where the people who tend the graves toss dead flowers and wreaths and, even though it’s about six in the morning, it’s already warm and muggy. It’s surprising, but I don’t feel too bad and, if at least I don’t recall much about the days that passed between its beginning and its end, I remember where this particular episode started – this ‘trip to Lourdes’, as my friend Richard used to call my drunken absences – and I know where I am, mostly from the colour of the bus passing on the street, but also because I possess – like a key, or a helpline number scribbled on the back of a beer mat – the half-formed, clouded memory of knocking at a sky-coloured door in the middle of the night, looking for a girl I’d continued to think of as a friend long after she’d decided that, first as a boyfriend, and then as tea-and-sympathy material, I wasn’t worth the trouble. I don’t know this yet, but it’s four days since I left home, and two since I invited myself to the little terraced house that Marianne – my not-quite girlfriend, not-quite friend – shares with two other women, a nurse and a student, both of them, like Marianne herself, older and wiser than me, able to recognise a lost cause when they see one and moved, as Marianne is, by mere pity when they have allowed me into their kitchen and fed me coffee and digestives, on my two or three previous visits. Not this time, though. Either they had all been out, or they were hiding in their beds, waiting for me to stagger off into the night and away, hopefully for ever.

  What happened to the two days since I did stagger away, my footsteps ringing down an empty street, I have no idea. It’s not the first or the last segment of my life that I have lost: over the years, I’ve mislaid whole months, one way or another. Even then, when I was seventeen, this kind of thing happened fairly often and, when it did, it seemed to come out of the blue. One minute I’d be sitting in the bar of the George, the next I’d be picking myself up off cold concrete, or some long-dead sailmaker’s grave, my body wreathed in grime and the stale smell of liquor. I would be cold, usually, but more often than not I was clad in a thin vapour of sweat, and I would always be struck by the smell of it, as if I had been translated in the night to another world, where malevolent spirits bathed me in some strange humour, denaturing me, making me alien to myself.

  To begin with, this was as far as it went. When I was in my late teens, working in factories over the summer vacation, or on the post at Christmas, a lunchtime drink might end three days later on the strip of waste ground behind a row of shops, or on the floor of some dingy squat, five, or three hundred, miles from where I’d started. Or I would go with somebody to some poky little flat, and it would carry on from there, long and hard into the night, then desperately into the next day, on a train to wherever it came into my head to go, or a bus, or a lift to some mythical party in Northampton, say, or some place out in the country that I’d never even heard of and wasn’t quite convinced was real. Once, when I was looking after my parents’ house during the holidays, I met a taciturn Glaswegian who said he was on the run from the army, and invited him back to the house. He had money, he’d bought a carry-out and, for a while at least, he must have amused me. The next evening, I got a lift from a guy in a pink and blue van on the Kettering road: I had left the former squaddie unconscious on my parents’ leatherette sofa, where he had passed out an hour before. It seems that I didn’t stop to worry about what he might do when he woke and found himself alone in a strange house, the back door wide open, his whisky bottle empty. If my mother had known, she would have died. If my father had found out, he would have killed me. Maybe that was why I did it. The only thing I remembered about the soldier was a thick, purplish scar – or rather, not a scar so much as a recently stitched seam that started at his chin and disappeared into the collar of his newly-pressed shirt. Maybe it was the shirt that convinced me he wouldn’t do any damage to the house, the fact that it was newly laundered and pressed, the fact that it had short sleeves. I’m not sure why, but I found those short sleeves oddly genteel. Maybe I just wasn’t sufficiently self-aware to bother. When these pilgrimages happened, they happened according to their own mysterious logic, a logic I not only didn’t understand, but had no part in. Perhaps it was the same logic that suggested, one fine day, that I really could do something about my father. After all, I’d had the knife in my hand, and I’d been ready to use it. All I had to do was see the logic through to its conclusion.

  Bert McKain came round every Hogmanay, doing his best to sound like Elvis, though he was only really convincing when he sang the King’s worst song, ‘Wooden Heart’. Not that this was a problem at our house: my mother loved that song, and my father was reminded of his time in Germany. For once, everybody was happy. The turn of the year was, at times, even pleasurable: formidable lumps of Dundee cake washed down with beer or port and lemon, the whisky waiting in the bottle till the bells rang (ours was one of those houses where the drinking of whisky was verboten before midnight, which didn’t stop my father sneaking a few rums around ten o’clock). Ten minutes into the new year, we would hear Bert coming along the road, his cheery, confident, not quite regal voice ringing out some old Elvis ballad or movie song. Bert was the only man I ever met who loved Dundee cake, and he didn’t mind what he washed it down with. Unlike the other men who roamed the streets on Hogmanay, he drank for as long as he enjoyed it, then he stopped. He knew his limit; he never did anything stupid or embarrassing. The women liked having him around – a steadying influence – and the kids adored him. I liked him too. Whenever I saw him, I caught myself smiling.

  Maybe it was Bert who prevented me from killing my father. Maybe it was just plain fear. Men like my father, or the Scandura gang, could do whatever they liked, because they had such a weak
sense of the consequences. I wasn’t like that. When I came to execute my plan, I was angry, but I wasn’t resolute. I’d found out that my father had gone back on his word and told my mother that I was on ‘heavy drugs’, and I knew he could be heard, late on a Friday night, announcing to all and sundry that he didn’t have a son, that he and my mother had found me under a hedge, and had taken me in. Ironic, given what I later discovered about him (though maybe not). None of this was new, of course. My father had been telling me for years that I wasn’t his son. Over time, he’d conjured up various explanations for my existence: I was adopted, I was a baby someone had left under a hedge on his road to work, I was the child of a secret lover my mother had known before he married her. He never repeated these stories when my mother was there, or when he was sober, and he rarely said the same thing twice: there would be slight changes, little details he would alter, from forgetfulness, or perhaps just to keep me interested. Once upon a time, I’d believed what he said – and this was why I’d come to the point of making plans, of thinking through the possibility of killing him. It was a cumulative thing, the result of years of hurt. I didn’t really have a plan at all, but I had a scheme, and that scheme was in me, part of what I was, a spell written into the fabric of my being.

  After the incident with the carving knife, war had been waged on a purely verbal basis, a war of slow attrition, of casual contempt and everyday hatred, a war that I knew would last until I could get away, once and for all. Our arguments were ugly and demeaning; every time I got into one, I felt as much contempt for myself as I did for him, but I couldn’t let it go, I had to keep at him, just as he had to keep going at me. We had dropped all pretence of father and son, of drinks and crib games and half-playful disagreement; now, we were bound together only by rage and hatred. Sometimes we skirted around one another, sullen and careful, too tired or disgusted to get into anything. Most of the time, though, the smallest thing would set us off: an ill-chosen word or gesture, something somebody said on television, any of the day’s hundred casual misunderstandings. Yet no matter where it all started, those arguments always came down to the same things: drugs versus alcohol, my wasted future, what I was going to do with my life, how I was killing my mother with my selfishness.